Hi! My name is Hank. I'm a software developer, Recurse Center alum, and proud resident of Queens, New York.
I spent my early years in NYC working as a ballet accompanist, getting to play piano for some of the top dance companies in the world. Gradually I began getting interested in programming because I wanted to build audio and MIDI-editing software.
My first programming language was Max/MSP, a visual programming language for music and audio. But I quickly encountered obstacles that I needed a more traditional programming language to solve, and learned JavaScript to handle some of these more complex tasks. From there, it was only a short leap to web development, which lead to me landing my first job as a full-stack software engineer at Econify, a NYC-based consultancy focused on improving performance for large-scale media corporations. Through them, I worked for several years at CNBC, where I got to work on an exciting new team building CNBC's Investing Club product.
While I loved my time at CNBC, I also wanted to experience what it would be like to work at a fast-paced startup, so joined Kustomer in 2024. Kustomer is a customer service platform that was acquired by Meta in 2020. At Kustomer I ramped up my abilities in every area, especially backend architecture and cloud infrastructure. It's been a wild ride but I've enjoyed every minute of it so far!