about

This is the blog of Alice Poteat. I’m a staff software engineer at volley - where I facilitate the dreams of our wonderful product team - and help unlock our shared vision for the future of “Netflix-style” interactive entertainment.

Among my current professional responsibilities are:

  • Coding.
  • Acting as technical project manager of various multi-team confidential projects.
  • Auditing hiring, team practices, and technical architecture across five engineering teams composed of 40+ engineers.
  • Reviewing all manner of major technical decisions, especially those involving security.
  • Talent recruiting.
    • please message me on LinkedIn if you’re looking!

education

I got a nice classical state engineering education then defected to startup land. I’m a proud alumnus of Old Dominion University and Tidewater Community College.

  • M.S. in Simulation Engineering
  • B.S. in Engineering, Minor in Computer Science
  • A.S. in Computer Science

graduate research

In 2016, my topic of research under Dr. Yiannis Papelis was linear-temporal logic and its applications in formal verification for robotics. Is it possible to prove constraints written in LTL about a robot’s behavior? Is LTL even the best formalism for specifying constraints about behavior - or could another representation be better? How can behavior be encoded in such a way that it can be formally verified, and how does that relate to the formalism used to specify constraints?

Ask me these questions and we may have an interesting conversation!

undergraduate research

NASA Langley Research Center

I was on a contract funded by Langley’s distributed computing unit. This is under embargo but I can say it involved Fortran, MPI, and a lot of fun. Ask me about this too.

ODU Bioinformatics Lab

I worked with the amazing Dr. Jing He for two years on multiple related initiatives involving computational analysis and deep learning applied to cryo-em data. This mostly involved secondary structure analysis of proteins - one of my projects for example involved using a least squares optimization method to fit NURBS curves to volumetric density maps.

I have experience developing Chimera plugins for what it’s worth…

timeline

In 2023 I gave a talk about higher-kinded types at typescript congress.

The Wall Street Journal once interviewed me about my illicit cryptocurrency mining operation.

In 2018 Volley was featured in TechCrunch.

In 2017 I was tangentially involved with autonomous catamarans.