# Assaf (@assaf.bsky.social)

Profile: https://sifa.id/p/assaf.bsky.social
Headline: ☝️ Cranking out projects like there’s no tomorrow.

## About

☕️ What are you working on next? Love to hear about it. Hit me up for coffee

## Career

- **Founder, CEO at Rentail** (Mar 2025 - Present)
  While e-commerce threatens to empty shopping centers, we're filling them back up—using AI to match the right merchants with the right spaces faster than any human broker ever could. At Rentail, our conversational AI doesn't just find tenants; it curates retail ecosystems that drive foot traffic and maximize ROI for property owners.
- **CTO at Overdryve Solutions, Inc.** (Feb 2024 - Mar 2025)
  Using AI to power auto shops.
- **Freelance at Freelance** (Jan 2022 - Dec 2023)
  Helping startups on a variety of products in different domains.
- **Board Member at Broadly** (Sep 2013 - Feb 2022)
- **Product and Platform at Demand Science** (Apr 2021 - Aug 2021)
- **Chief Technology Officer at Broadly** (Sep 2013 - Oct 2019)
- **Engineering manager at Demandforce** (Oct 2011 - Aug 2013)
  Led the team working on the consumer facing side of the product and quadrupled key metrics.
- **Lead Engineer at Flowtown** (Jul 2010 - Oct 2011)
  Got in when small team was working on a product that wasn't fully reliable, got to fix all these glaring issues, and ended getting acquired by Demandforce.
- **Committer at Apache Software Foundation** (1999 - Oct 2011)
  Founding member of XML Apache (alongside IBM and Sun), Ode and Buildr.
- **Making stuff happen at 880river** (Jul 2009 - 2010)
  880river is about connecting people under the same address.
  
  Services we run include Apartly and Yaketee.
- **CTO at Intalio** (Aug 1999 - Jul 2009)
  Founded this company just before the big .com crash and yet it's still alive and selling products to this day. We focused a lot on open-source and enterprise capabilities (J2EE, BPM, the works). How cool is it to find out that one of your projects is being used by NASA for the Mars rover?
- **Author at Manning Publications** (2007 - Mar 2009)
  Co-author of Ruby in Practice (with Jeremy McAnally): http://manning.com/mcanally/

## Skills

### Technical
- Distributed Systems
- JSON
- Ruby
### Other
- Agile Methodologies
- AJAX
- Amazon EC2
- Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- BDD
- CEO
- Chef
- CSS
- CTO
- EC2
- ElasticSearch
- Founder
- Gen AI
- HTML 5
- JavaScript
- MongoDB
- MySQL
- Node.js
- Open Source
- Redis
- REST
- Scalability
- Scrum
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Sinatra
- Software Engineering
- Specialty Retail
- TDD
- Technology Leadership
- Test Driven Development
- User Experience (UX)
- XML

## Projects

- **Inbox** — https://inbox.labnotes.org (Aug 2026 - Present)
  Cleans USPS Informed Delivery digests via Fastmail JMAP push.
  
  
- **Expense** — https://expense.labnotes.org (Jul 2026 - Present)
  Your receipts, all collected to prepare for tax season. Expense does that for you: take a picture of it, drop a screenshot or a receipt email. OCR recognizes the merchant and amount and puts the spend into the correct category of a Schedule C form and a report of your choice. And when tax season comes, all is ready.
- **Rentail** — https://rentail.space (Mar 2025 - Present)
  Find short-term retail spaces in shopping centers—without the broker meetings or endless phone calls. Built for small businesses and seasonal sellers. Just instant matches with spaces ready for your products.

## Publications

- The Buildr Book — Amazon (Jun 2009) http://www.amazon.com/Buildr-Assaf-Arkin/dp/1442160942/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1335838094&sr=8-1
- Ruby In Practice — Manning (Mar 2009) http://www.manning.com/mcanally/

## Languages

- English (native)

## Links

- GitHub: https://github.com/assaf
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/assafarkin/
- Website: https://labnotes.org
- Fediverse: https://mas.to/@assaf