Hello!

You’ve reached my personal website. Welcome.

I’m a software engineer at Jane Street. I love writing Haskell, but realistically most of my job is Julia Python prompting Claude OCaml(!!). You can find me on GitHub at @penelopeysm (although note that none of my Jane Street work is there).

More about me

• Before Jane Street, I was a research software engineer at The Alan Turing Institute for around three years. My work there was almost fully open-source, and included development of various packages for numerical computing in the Julia programming language. You can see a lot of this on my GitHub profile.
• I dabble in compilers. I’m not an expert at all; I’m just following textbooks. You can see my progress on Nora Sandler’s Writing A C Compiler here. (Spoiler alert: said progress is slow.) I’m currently maintaining JuliaFormatter.jl.
• At my old workplace, I worked on diversity and inclusion for around two years. I’m particularly passionate about levelling the playing field through education and open knowledge. Amongst other initiatives, I developed and taught a course on cryptography as part of the Turing Summer Experience.
• I’m a classical musician. This blog actually started because at one point I decided to start collecting classical music concerts that I’d attended. For some time I tried to talk a little bit about what I enjoyed (or did not enjoy) about each of them with some justification, although these are of course all subjective, and are not intended as a review of how good the performance was. I’ve since given up on reviewing them and now just record the repertoire. Unfortunately I don’t have full records of concerts before 2024. Nowadays I play in the London Repertoire Orchestra. You should come along, it's great fun!
• I have a complete collection of all (breedable) Pokémon in all rare balls—which (depending on your perspective) can be either impressive, unhinged, or impressively unhinged—but it kept me sane during my PhD. One of my first real programming projects was actually a damage calculator for the Battle Factory in Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver. (Don't look at the code, it’s atrocious!) In more recent times, I made and maintain a Discord bot for a Pokémon trading server.
• I really like bubble tea.
• In a past life I was a quantum chemist. Even though I don’t regret moving into software, I do sometimes miss working on that.

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