Nick Shapiro

About

I'm a software engineer with a founder's mindset. I focus on the results that matter. I have 20+ years of web development experience, with deep expertise in full-stack LAMP, Python, PHP, and Perl. I also work in TypeScript and have spent recent years building reinforcement learning projects from scratch with PyTorch.

Before that, I founded Game Craftsmen and ran it for 12 years. I bootstrapped it with credit cards, ran a Kickstarter, raised angel and institutional funding, and grew it to profitability. I hired and managed 20+ employees and over 100 freelancers. I had a successful exit, every investor made money. The new owner is profitable, my entire team stayed in place (minus me), and the games are still running with a thriving player community. Win-win-win.

I've also been a CTO at another long running startup, and a software engineer at a company that was acquired by Google for $500M.

I hold an MS in Computer Science and a BS in Astrophysics from Michigan State University.

Featured Work

The Choice Before Us

🏆 Grand Prize · Future of Life Institute · 300+ entries

An incremental browser game that teaches AI safety concepts through gameplay. Built solo with TypeScript and the Profectus framework. Won a contest run by the Future of Life Institute.

Dandelions

PyTorch · Deep Q Learning · Web game

Magic of the Bellman equation.

Tube Game

Python · A* search vs BFS vs DQN

A* wins.

Document Brain

Python · FAISS · RAG · LangChain

Ingests legal documents in multiple formats, indexes with FAISS vector store. Answers always include citations to original source.

Hero Stories

LAMP

One of the games I made has players (Superheroes) engaging in over 10,000 PvP battles per day. Hero Stories feeds the most important battles to an LLM in real time. The system publishes stories based on the real players actual actions, their profile, their histories, etc. The players absolutely love it.

See also integer sequences 336748 and 336759 in the The Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences. (Does that give me an Erdős number of 2? Debatable...)

Coinbird on Solana: Menu driven tool to make a new coin in seconds. Mint it, distribute it, create a market, trade it, air drop it, all in seconds from the command line or agent.

Data Mining the Mining Data: Process over 10,000 government documents in various formats related to Gold Mining claims. Thar's gold in that data!

Let's Talk

I'm looking for a software engineering role in web development or machine learning where I can focus on building great things with a strong team. Open to remote, hybrid, or on-site in the SF Bay Area.