I'm a software engineer based in NYC. I've previously worked at Zoom and Keybase.
I taught computer science at Dickinson High School from 2018-2019 (via TEALS).
You can email me at daniel AT ayoubd DOT com
Here's list of selected non-professional projects I've worked on since college, ordered by recency.
- Tally - NYTimes Crossword score tracker with user stats and tournaments for comparing times with others ⚔️
- Pillbug - Medication journal & reminders app that aims to bridge the reminder-reality disconnect
- Pottery - Batch of completed work from my first pottery class in 2021
- Bread - Bread recipe
- Feedr.sh - Syndication subscription manager
- Mimesis - Coordinate reading pools
- Single Photon LIDAR - Depth sensing ML algorithm
- cTracks - Link sharing application
- Mediator - Communications multiplexer for hybrid quadcopter
- Filter Design Project - Low-pass filter design/analysis/experiment
This is an index of all the books and notable articles I've read since entering college. I keep this list to refer back to running thoughts, and in response to the realization that I can sometimes completely forget that I've read a book. For the most part they are in the order I read them. Essays and other long-form works are marked with *.
- The Things they Carried - Tim O'Brien
- I actually read this in a high school english class, but it had a significant impact on the way I think about books and story-telling in general. O'Brien takes a humanist stance on the meaning of story-telling, something I had never thought about at the time. In it's own way, this book is an argument for expanding the scope of honesty in non-fiction beyond getting the fact straight, and I could hardly imagine a more compelling context than the Vietnam War.
- The Fault in Our Stars - John Green
- Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett
- The Perks of Being a Wallflower - Stephen Chbosky
- Looking for Alaska - John Green
- Anthem - Ayn Rand
- On The Road - Jack Kerouac
- Siddhartha - Hermann Hesse
- Winesburg, Ohio - Sherwood Anderson
- True Grit - Charles Portis
- In Our Time - Ernest Hemingway
- The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
- A Good Man is Hard to Find - Flannery O'Connor
- Self Help - Lorrie Moore
- The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon
- A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
- Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
- Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
- Took a long year for this book to become cemented as a cornerstone of my psyche. Wallace's overt and earnest knowledge of tennis, addiction, international relations, English, filmmaking, etc. gives a cryptic yet somehow coherent map of his view on what it means to be human surrounded by endless media and advertising. Hard to get in to (I had two false starts), but eventually a joy to read and incredibly rewarding. Looking forward to reading this again.
- *The Photographic Evangels - Susan Sontag
- How the Other Half Lives - Jacob Riis
- *Of Our Spiritual Strivings - W. E. B. Du Bois
- *King Leopold's Soliloquy - Mark Twain
- Camera Lucida - Roland Barthes
- *The Price is Right - Emily Nussbaum
- Fantastic. Nussbaum is a generous enthusiast.
- Let Us Not Praise Famous Men - James Agee & Walker Evans
- Seeing Through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography
- Berger offers an interesting parallel narrative of the role photography played in the Civil Rights Movement as one that furthered the victimization of blacks in the eyes of popular culture. His arguments are strong albeit a bit ambitious, but nevertheless it was a great and thought-provoking read.
- The Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane
- Cerebral and spiritual.
- *The Colour Out of Space - H.P. Lovecraft
- *"Objects" (from Tender Buttons) - Gertrude Stein
- Quicksand - Nella Larson
- *Portraits and Repetition - Gertrude Stein
- The Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane
- Autobiography of Red - Anne Carson
- A delightful book. Anne Carson is terse yet tender and is excellent at intimating Geryon's remote moods and thoughts in a close, erotic way.
- Red Doc> - Anne Carson
- Darker and more difficult than AoR
- A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
- A warning for the Ignatius in all of us?
- Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
- Tolstoy is an academic of human nature, but I think this work is presented much better as a serial than a one-shot publication.
- Between The World and Me - Ta-Nehisi Coates
- Leaving The Atocha Station - Ben Lerner
- 10:04: A Novel - Ben Lerner
- Fun Home - Alison Bechdel
- The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present - Douglas Coupland & Hans Ulrich Obrist
- The Eden Express - Mark Vonnegut
- What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours - Helen Oyeyemi
- So so good. Everything it's chalked up to be.
- My Age Of Anxiety - Scott Stossel
- Franny & Zooey - J.D. Salinger
- Boy, Snow, Bird - Helen Oyeyemi
- Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami
- The Three-Body Problem - Liu Cixin
- The Dark Forest - Liu Cixin
- Turtles All the Way Down - John Green
- Death's End - Liu Cixin
- Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity - David Foster Wallace
- This was OK. The math was not especially hard to follow, but sometimes skipped a few steps or made statements that didn't directly follow from the preceding explanations. It was enjoyable enough as a whole, and had a nice mix of proofs laid out in prose (sometimes painfully so) and interesting details about the mathematician's lives. As always it's fun to experience DFW's disregard for the little [archaic] annotations in my dictionary.
- Coraline - Neil Gaiman
- *Do What You Want - zine edited by Leah Pritchard and Ruby Tandoh
- Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue - Ryan Holiday
- Widow Basquiat - Jennifer Clement
- Clement's prose reminds me of Anne Carson's in AoR.
I took a break from tracking which books I've read from around 2018-2024. As expected, as I write this in 2024, I've completely forgotten about some of the books in the above list, which is bewildering. Starting again from 2024:
- A Little Life - Hanya Yanagihara
- Crying in H Mart - Michelle Zauner
- The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde