Hey!
I’m Abe. I’m a software engineer. I grew up in Santa Cruz, California, and I live in New York City.
In my spare time I like taking photos, hiking, climbing, cooking, reading, and making silly little edits to Wikipedia.
My favorite places in the world are the California desert, the Adirondacks, Istanbul, and the Scottish Highlands. I’ll probably love anywhere with good food and good people, or wide-open landscapes and no people.
Get in touch:
Work
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2021–present: Zotero, the world’s most popular reference manager. Zotero helps millions of researchers organize their work, annotate documents, collaborate with others, and produce accurate citations in any citation style.
I contribute across most areas of the Zotero desktop app (its main interface). I’m the primary developer of the EPUB and HTML reader, and I’ve also done a lot of work to modernize our codebase, improve security, implement a major redesign, and build developer tools.
Zotero is free and open-source software, a project of Digital Scholar.
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2023–present: Zayt, a Czech Jewish genealogical archive. Zayt hosts about 320,000 pages of historical records and provides a modern, easy-to-use interface for search, reading, and annotation. (Most genealogical archives do not have interfaces you’d describe as “good.”) Zayt also provides PDF downloads for all documents. It’s the only place on the internet where some important Czech Jewish sources are available.
Zayt is a solo project, funded by donations.
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2018–2019: Intern at Keysight, working on tools for sensor calibration. I updated the C#/MATLAB calibration stack and experimented with ML for validating calibrations.
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2015–2017: Mentorship with Dr. Larry Masinter, Adobe, developing an open standard for linking data displayed in PDFs to source datasets.
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2013–2016: Co-founder of Futuristic Lights, a consumer festival electronics manufacturer. I developed a custom online point-of-sale and order fulfillment system (mini-Shopify with shipping built in) in Scala. Funded via Kickstarter.
Education
I graduated from UC Berkeley in 2021 with a triple major in computer science, history, and Arabic. That’s one or two too many majors, but I loved all of them.
I received high honors (magna cum laude) in history for my thesis on Jewish agricultural settlers in the American West and Victoria, Australia. I was advised in my thesis research by Professor John M. Efron.
My favorite class overall was probably History 167D, Berlin. (I love focused history studies.) My favorite CS class was probably CS 162, Operating Systems. But it’s hard to pick.
Trivia
I’ve been to 34 countries, including one partially-recognized state that no longer exists (Artsakh, aka Nagorno-Karabakh) and one that still does (Kosovo).