# nate (@zzstoatzz.io)

Profile: https://sifa.id/p/zzstoatzz.io
Headline: senior software engineer: maintaining oss and applying ai

## About

Hi, I’m Nate!   Shameless nerd, incessant question-asker & chemical engineering / physics graduate from University of Michigan - Ann Arbor, I currently work as a software engineer at Prefect on open-source data and ai tooling.

I maintain several popular open-source libraries like prefect, fastmcp and marvin, while contributing upstream when possible or necessary to projects like pydantic. I love ATProtocol, which I got started with by contributing to their python SDK, and now operate several pieces community infrastructure.

At prefect, I build and maintain interfaces between our orchestration/events APIs and the larger data ecosystem: integration libraries, pydantic, docker/k8s, agentic while loops, data stores. I slot AI into existing data tooling to remove toil from the densely toil-rich field we call Data Engineering (and now AI engineering, if we’re feeling it!).

Having started in data engineering consulting (internal libraries and web apps ranging in levels of sanity), I focus on designing and maintaining libraries and tools that are easy to trust and build upon. Feedback from real people is important to me—I parse themes from varied communities of thousands of engineers/customers to share what I’ve learned and build for all.

If I could resurrect a dead person, it would be Richard Feynman (if you were wondering).

## Experience

- **Materials / General Engineer at L.E. Jones Company** (2017 – 2017)
  \- Initiated transition from contracted to in-house website management by creating fully functional company website using HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Google API
  \- Created production valve-seat models for project engineers with SOLIDWORKS
  \- Worked closely with gauging department – created dimensioned part diagrams for operator reference and gathered operator input to improve workflow
- **Research Assistant at University of Michigan** (2019 – 2019)
  \-Wrote Monte Carlo models of percolating systems using union-find and path compression methods to observe emergence of long-range connectivity in various networks  -Automated simulation-analysis workflow using Python, pandas, and shell scripts  (from 20 mins of organizing output data to < 5 seconds per batch of output data) -Drafted and summarized simulation results in LaTeX as potential publication material for my supervisor.
- **Data Engineer at SLATE (acquired by Prefect)** (2021 – 2021)
  \- Writing Prefect-orchestrated EL(T) pipelines running on GKS/EKS to support clients' data integration practice
  \- Provisioning client infrastructure on AWS, GCP, Azure to enable HA, distributed workflows
  \- Exploring, contributing to, and leveraging new data-integration tools like Airbyte to keep in touch with modern patterns
  \- Identifying time & money sinks, reproducing important outcomes with open-source alternatives to inflexible, closed-source and costly tools
- **Software Engineer at Prefect** (2022 – 2024)
  \- implementing distributed task queues in the OSS and cloud product
  \- designing interfaces between Prefect core and common tools it can orchestrate and observe
  \- using LLMs, embeddings, and redis to build open-source tooling used internally to extend the team
  \- maintaining DevOps / GitOps tooling in support of these interfaces
  \- contributing features to Prefect in response to ecosystem trends
  \- Participate in 24/7 on-call rotation to monitor and maintain the performance and reliability of Prefect Cloud.
- **Physics Educator at Numerade** (2020 – 2021)
- **Senior Software Engineer at Prefect** (2024 – present)
  \- expanding and maintaining the open-source Prefect SDK and server components
  \- building AI-powered systems (NLIs + RAG etc) to extend teams within the organization
  \- working with leadership and marketing to improve our digital footprint and outreach
  \- working on next-gen tooling (fastmcp, pydantic-ai, rust-powered python)
- **Solutions Engineer at Prefect** (2021 – 2022)
  As a member of the professional services team, I acted as a consulting data engineer. This involved:
  \- breaking down business logic into problems that are solvable with cloud-native tooling
  \- python workflow development and data warehouse maintenance in support of data analysts and ML practitioners
  \- provisioning runtime infrastructure for those workflows with Terraform on their cloud providers
  \- contributing to open-source projects used in client projects (including Prefect and Airbyte)
- **Quality Engineer at Air Products** (2018 – 2018)
  \- Trained plant equipment models from aggregated cloud datasets using non-linear regression methods
  \- Created and trained equipment models for 50+ new HYCO plants in Asia
  \- Investigated deviating models to determine the process inputs causing error
  \- Recommended action to plant managers for breaches of process specifications (e.g. recommend cleaning compressors if vibration readings persistently high)
  \- Took part in re-platforming of in-house equipment modeling software

## Education

- **University of Michigan** — Bachelor of Science - BS, Chemical Engineering and Physics (2016 – 2020)

## Skills

- Asynchronous work
- redis streams
- Documentation
- Jinja
- Information Extraction
- LaTeX
- Git
- Pandas (Software)
- Technical Writing
- Automation
- Leadership
- Software Development
- Kubernetes
- Terraform
- Code Generation
- Knowledge Graph Embeddings
- FastAPI
- pydantic
- docker
- LLM dev tools
- mypy
- Web Scraping
- Agents
- Python (Programming Language)
- Linux
- Jupyter
- Python
- Front-end Development
- Data Analysis
- Consulting
- Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Software Design
- Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
- natural language interfaces
- Large Language Models (LLM)
- AT Protocol

## Certifications

- AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate — Amazon Web Services (AWS) (https://www.credly.com/badges/1e0c7779-18aa-4a71-a7b7-ff8caa242501?source=linked_in_profile)
- Prefect Associate Certification — Prefect (https://www.credential.net/67c81bc5-e216-47fe-b5a6-2c72bef51c1c)

## Projects

- **marvin**
  the OG structured outputs library
- **fastmcp** — https://github.com/PrefectHQ/fastmcp/
- **plyr.fm** — https://plyr.fm
- **zlay** — https://tangled.org/zzstoatzz.io/zlay
- **atproto actor typeahead** — https://typeahead.waow.tech

## Publications

- Continue reading on Unthread
- get in loser, we're a-sembling — nate.leaflet.pub (https://nate.leaflet.pub/3mnxnia4lvk2n)
- moderation — half-baked.pckt.blog (https://half-baked.pckt.blog/moderation-f9a4hyp)
- open source your shit! — half-baked.pckt.blog (https://half-baked.pckt.blog/open-source-your-shit-hsndt4e)
- how to be anti-social — nate.leaflet.pub (https://nate.leaflet.pub/3mk4xkaxobc2p)
- Continue reading on Unthread
- within my ken — nate.leaflet.pub (https://nate.leaflet.pub/3mj5mknhufc23)
- notes — nate.leaflet.pub (https://nate.leaflet.pub/3mj35qbougk2i)
- atproto dev chat V recap — nate.leaflet.pub (https://nate.leaflet.pub/3mgphojvq5c2g)
- Continue reading on Unthread
- reducing my compute spend — nate.leaflet.pub (https://nate.leaflet.pub/3mg6txeiqi22k)
- atproto dev chat IV recap — nate.leaflet.pub (https://nate.leaflet.pub/3mfl3dgrlwk2z)
- increasing my compute spend — nate.leaflet.pub (https://nate.leaflet.pub/3mfg72xdkec2r)
- AT Protocol Developer Call Recap — nate.leaflet.pub (https://nate.leaflet.pub/3mewqdbxnlk2x)
- things i've made recently — nate.leaflet.pub (https://nate.leaflet.pub/3mei6gg5mfc27)
- unfettered — nate.leaflet.pub (https://nate.leaflet.pub/3mdyxqnd7zc2c)
- AT Protocol Developer Call Recap — nate.leaflet.pub (https://nate.leaflet.pub/3mdtlv2422c2i)
- waow, tech! — nate.offprint.app (https://nate.offprint.app/a/3mcwxrkpmlk23-waow-tech)
- first pckt post! — half-baked.pckt.blog (https://half-baked.pckt.blog/first-pckt-post-13z8wvn)
- some recent yak shaving!
- the power of software compels you! — nate.leaflet.pub (https://nate.leaflet.pub/3mac4dcsums2h)
- quicksliced my status — nate.leaflet.pub (https://nate.leaflet.pub/3m7vxq3ktqk2a)
- running list of repros via uv in the wild — nate.leaflet.pub (https://nate.leaflet.pub/3m7qglnd6bk2m)
- making a docs MCP server — nate.leaflet.pub (https://nate.leaflet.pub/3m4tkvaq4gk2h)
- a Prefect MCP server — nate.leaflet.pub (https://nate.leaflet.pub/3m47aqadmrs2j)
- friday night tangled-mcp — nate.leaflet.pub (https://nate.leaflet.pub/3m2vldeq2wk2d)
- slack status, without the slack — nate.leaflet.pub (https://nate.leaflet.pub/3lxuuwa5il22a)
- hello world — nate.leaflet.pub (https://nate.leaflet.pub/3lxkt4c6kds2j)

## Other profiles

- dns: https://waow.tech
- dns: https://zzstoatzz.io
- github: https://github.com/zzstoatzz