Michael Hartl

Insoshi

Mountain View, CA

Founder & CEO

Open-source social networking platform in Ruby on Rails. The Insoshi source code is available on GitHub, and is currently the second most popular forked repository (after Ruby on Rails itself). Insoshi is a Y Combinator company.

 

Sole proprietorship

Los Angeles, CA

Principal

Technical consulting and web development

• Author (with Aurelius Prochazka) of RailsSpace: Building a Social Networking Website with Ruby on Rails (part of the Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series), a tutorial introduction to the Ruby on Rails web development framework
• Clients included the Caltech Alumni Association, Idealab, and Auditude, Inc.

 

Quark Sports

Pasadena, CA

Cofounder

Weekly fantasy sports games and the leading independent NCAA Tournament site

• Responsible for designing, implementing, and administering fantasy sports website (quarksports.com) and the leading independent NCAA basketball tournament bracket manager (bracketmanager.com)
• Successfully recruited and managed graphic designer and public relations firm
• Principal author and designer of substantial Python codebase (> 20,000 lines), including robust and scalable XHTML-generation and MySQL libraries
• Author of Python extension module in C++/SWIG, gaining 50-fold improvement in speed of constrained optimization algorithm for fantasy sports salary-cap games
• Negotiated exclusive bracket management services for the #1 NCAA basketball weblog (YOCO :: college basketball)

 

Caltech and Addison-Wesley

Pasadena, CA

Editor

The Feynman Lectures on Physics: The Definitive and Extended Edition

• Caltech's editor on the team responsible for correcting and expanding the all-time best-selling physics lectures
• Responsible for vetting and approving errata for The Feynman Lectures on Physics and approving style and physics content of Feynman's Tips on Physics

 

California Institute of Technology

Pasadena, CA

Postdoctoral Fellow and Research Assistant in Physics

Research in theoretical astrophysics

• Implemented, profiled, and optimized numerical simulators in C and C++ for integrating systems of coupled nonlinear differential equations modeling the chaotic orbits of binary black holes
• Implemented simulation-control and data-analysis programs in Perl and Python
• Designed and implemented graphical and statistical analysis software in Mathematica

 

California Institute of Technology

Pasadena, CA

Physics Instructor

Courses in mechanics, electrodynamics, quantum mechanics, and scientific computing

• Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Teaching (2000)
• Created and filled position of Head Instructor; responsible for preparing twice-weekly lectures and biweekly examination reviews
• Instructor for approximately half of Caltech undergraduates, 1997–2001

 

Choral and a cappella singing

• Tenor/lead vocals in Ecphonema, a small pop-rock a cappella group (2003–2005)
• Tenor in the Caltech Glee Club (1997–2004)
• Baritone in the Harvard-Radcliffe Chorus (1993–1996)

 

Caltech alumni activities

Pasadena, CA

• Caltech Alumni Association Careers Committee (2005–2007)
• Session Chair for Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships (SURF) annual Seminar Day (1998–2006)
• SURF Alumni Outreach Committee (1998–2001)
• Caltech Gnome Club (founded 1897) (2006–present)

 

Capitalism Club

Los Angeles, CA

Cofounder

Entrepreneur club with companies in technology and entertainment

• Principal organizer of bimonthly meetings
• Recruited Forbes Magazine's 2004 "Future Capitalist of the Year"

 

Harvard Science Review

Cambridge, MA

Editor-in-Chief (1994–1995) and Associate Editor (1992–1994)

• Coordinated team of writers and editors to produce biannual science magazine
• Author of articles on cosmology, quantum chaos, and number theory

 

California Institute of Technology (Caltech)

Pasadena, CA

Ph.D. in Physics (2003); M.S. in Physics (1999)

Thesis: Dynamics of spinning compact binaries in general relativity

 

Harvard College

Cambridge, MA

A.B. magna cum laude in Physics (1996)

• Elected to Phi Beta Kappa (1996)
• Detur Book Prize (top 60 in class) (1993)