Lincoln Quirk
Objective
To bring about universal flourishing of humanity and its descendants through software.
Experience
Founder & Head of Product,
Wave Mobile Money,
Dakar, Senegal
Jan 2018 -
- Led, grew, and set product direction for product & engineering team of 50+
Founder & Head of Product,
Sendwave,
Boston, MA
Aug 2011 - Feb 2021
- Designed, built, and maintained the Sendwave money transfer app and backend
- Led and grew technical & product teams to 30+ people
- Sold Sendwave to WorldRemit in 2021 for $500M
Fellow,
Rationality Mega-Camp,
Machine Intelligence Research Institute,
Berkeley, CA
Jun 2011 - Aug 2011
- Analyzed and tweaked life goals, reduced cognitive biases, increased conscientiousness and goal-seeking behavior, improved social effectiveness, learned tricks for hacking my brain
- Learned about existential risk reduction and artificial general intelligence from some of the leading minds in the field
Engineer,
Demiurge Studios, Inc.,
Cambridge, MA
Oct 2009 - May 2011
- Gameplay, game engine, and tools programming. Tasks in many areas -- achievements, platform support, networking, tools, and UI.
- Credited on: "Green Day: Rock Band"; "Rock Band Country Track Pack 2"; "Shoot Many Robots"
Founder,
Newsbrane Inc.,
Boston, MA
Jul 2008 - Aug 2009
- Designed and constructed news aggregation Web app using Django/MySQL
- Designed and developed news recommendation engine
- Assembled the business: built a network of contacts, wrote business plans, got funding
- Set up and maintained Linux servers for Web serving, data crunching, and other business functions
Intern,
Game Development,
One Laptop Per Child,
Cambridge, MA
May 2007 - Sep 2007
- Constructed and maintained game development infrastructure based on Pygame on custom hardware with Linux-based operating system. (Through Google Summer of Code.)
Undergraduate TA,
CS Department, Brown University,
Providence, RI
Nov 2005 - May 2008
- TA for CS167/9 - Operating Systems and Lab. Mentored two students in implementing their own operating system. Helped to debug many more.
- TA for CS031 - Introduction to Computer Systems
- Head TA for CS138 - Networked Information Systems. Significantly developed course material, including designing and fleshing out new assignments.
- Head TA for CS032 - Introduction to Software Engineering
- For each, I helped students learn course material one-on-one on hours, graded assignments, and contributed to course development.
Intern,
WAFL,
Network Appliance, Inc.,
Sunnyvale, CA
Jun 2006 - Sep 2006
- Designed and implemented API for file content hashing within filesystem
- Contributed to design of related systems through meeting participation and code reviews
QA and Software Development Intern,
Solidworks Corp.,
Concord, MA
Feb 2004 - Aug 2005
- Ported Cosmic Blobs, a Windows OpenGL game in C++ and Python, to Mac OS X using Carbon
- Designed and implemented automated test framework
- Maintained and extended company bug tracking database using ColdFusion and SQL
Founder,
WirtsLeg.com,
Acton, MA
May 2003 - Sep 2003
WirtsLeg.com was a business that found and sold valuable items within the Diablo II game world.
- Designed and implemented item database and online store
- Developed tools to help acquire items
Software Development Intern,
CogniToy LLC,
Acton, MA
2001 - 2003
- Developed game scenarios and components
- Developed Web and database applications
Education
ScB with honors in Computer Science, Brown University, 2008.
I also did a semester of Ph.D work at Harvard University School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. I dropped out to start Chime.
Major academic projects:
- JOS for CS261 at Harvard, a working operating system on x86 (via QEMU) following the exokernel architecture, with virtual memory, userland, multiprocessor support, and device drivers. I designed and implemented a safe code-uploading programming language and runtime for allowing user processes to control the multiprocessor scheduler.
- "X", a concurrent message-passing, security-oriented, efficient, compiled language. Designed and implemented in a group of 3 as a group independent study. This was my honors project and briefly became a startup I worked on for a few months, before switching to Newsbrane.
- Diplomacy for CS32 at Brown, a 3D network game done in a group of four of which I was the project lead.
- Swordplay for CS134 at Brown, a 3D virtual reality game with 6-DOF input devices. Co-authored an article: "Swordplay: Innovating Game Development through VR," appearing in IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, vol. 26, no. 6, pp. 15-19, Nov/Dec, 2006.
- Weenix for CS169 at Brown, a working operating system with threads, filesystems, device drivers and virtual memory, implemented atop the Brown Simulator.
Awesome high-level courses I loved:
- [Harvard] CS 252r, Advanced Topics in Programming Languages: developed certified programming language implementations in Coq. (Greg Morrisett)
- [Harvard] CS 261, Research Topics in Operating Systems: read many systems papers, implemented a few. (Eddie Kohler)
- [Brown] CS 296-2, Large-Scale Networked Systems: studied latest research on incentive-compatible distributed systems and constructed a modified BitTorrent client. (John Jannotti)
- [Brown] CS 176, Multiprocessor Synchronization: studied the principles of concurrency, locks, lock-free algorithms, and software transactional memory. (Maurice Herlihy)
- [Brown] CS 173, Programming Languages (Shriram Krishnamurthi)
- [Brown] CS 167/9, Operating Systems and Lab (Tom Doeppner)
- [Brown] CS 138, Distributed Systems: constructed a distributed database and used it to implement a networked game (Ugur Cetintemel)
Personal Interests
Effective altruism, Rust, Haskell, rationality, writing, beer brewing, cooking, skiing, video games, Linux.