Portrait of a happy Tyler Termini.

Tyler

Termini

~4 years experience shipping software in technical roles.

Previously served as a product engineer, product manager, customer success lead, and digital consultant for a couple startups, one bootstrapped software company, and one non-profit.

Living in San Jose, CA.

Recommendations

Christian Lilley, Distinguished Engineer at McKinsey for 11+ years:

If you are hiring for great engineers - not the ‘most experienced’, nor the the ones who ‘already know what I need’, but GREAT engineers - then you want to hire Tyler. But… he’s not the guy you’re going to pick on the strength of his CV. Instead… if you hire for demonstrated problem-solving skills and technical fearlessness, rather than book-knowledge and certs, then you want to hire Tyler. If you hire for collaborativeness, professionalism and proven analytical ability rather than ‘seniority’, then you want to hire Tyler. Plus, if you want someone who will talk to your business and product people, ask them perceptive questions, and then chart the most efficient path to the real goal, you want to hire Tyler. Really. He’s a legit unicorn.

As proof: I met Tyler after he had helped his friends bootstrap a crazy idea into a viable startup product. He had no formal training, and near-zero experience, but somehow made it happen. That was impressive enough. But then I got to work with him. First of all, I’ve never worked with an engineer who was a better communicator, nor more even-keeled and collaborative. He’s a natural leader already, the kind of person you want around not because they boss people, but because they’ll thoughtfully, respectfully support their colleagues and improve your team culture, while manifesting healthy-but-minimal ego.

But then… I kept giving him ever-greater technical challenges, expecting I would quickly find his limits. Still hasn’t happened. “Containerize the API server”, I said. He did it. “OK… Now convert it to software-defined infra, and adopt better security practices.” He did it. “Figure out where the memory leak is in our application.” He did it, and then taught us all an impromptu lesson in how Node does garbage-collection, which was a term he didn’t even know 6 months ago. And what else: he’s deploying AI/ML models, integrating content pipelines, etc, etc. Along the way, he has offered more insightful commentary on technical and architectural choices than most engineers with CS degrees and years of ‘experience’. It’s all just stuff he has picked up along the way, while bootstrapping his way to greatness. In truth, he didn’t really even need me to tell him how to improve. He just needed someone to validate his excellent instincts, and then help him to test them on adequately worthy problems.

I have interviewed hundreds of engineers, have hired many dozens, and I’ve contracted 100’s more; at McKinsey, at clients, and at the elite vendor shops we used. I’d recommend Tyler to any of those organizations he wanted to work at, although I’d steer him away from any but the best (for him). If you should be so lucky as to grab him so he can take the next step in his career, please just take good care of him and groom him well… but know that I’ll always be eager to work with him again, as will anyone else I know. (No pressure.)

Farzad Khosravi, created the Customer Success team at Nylas; founder Cicero.ly:

Tyler’s skills are beyond measure. He searches for the truth in all systems. I’ve never met someone who does so much research. Best of all, he has the grit and wisdom to turn that research into progress at supersonic speeds. He puts everything above his ego and this enables him to excel immensely as an entrepreneur, an engineer, and a product-minded leader.

All work

Cicero

Cicero was my passion project. It was co-founded with my friends Farzad Khosravi and Noah Lowenthal. It was our way of participating in the conversation sparked by organizations like the Center for Humane Technology. The aim was to create a Twitter-like experience that made it easy to follow world-leading thinkers across any appearances or platforms they published on.

For Cicero I touched everything. Brand design, product design, lo-fi and hi-fi mockups, user interviews, I engineered a large portion of the web API, built the personalized email notifications service, built several features in our React front-end, built a critical internal tool for publishing and reviewing content, and most recently built the data pipelining services to deploy our AI R&D work to production (LLM-based topic classification and “high-rung vs low-rung” classification).

Unfortunately as of early 2024, Cicero is now defunct, but the core mission is still alive in all of us and will likely re-manifest in some other way!

Bay Area Glass Institute

The Bay Area Glass Institute is the South Bay’s only non-profit glass arts studio. They feature introductory and advanced classes across several glass disciplines, including glassblowing, flameworking, fusing, coldworking, and hopefully one day, neon-bending.

BAGI came to me originally looking to smooth out their content management workflow, as it was highly error-prone and didn’t properly serve leads and customers (most web visitors opted to call the office instead when they couldn’t figure out how to book a class).

I came together with the BAGI team, board, and Executive Director, and proposed a more holistic solution that involved re-designing the web experience, the underlying content management system, and building custom software to faciliate the publishing and selling of classes and experiences. Once complete, the new bagi.org will feature:

  • a coherent digital design language
  • a content re-structuring that prioritizes critical revenue-influencing flows, like booking a class or rental slot
  • a true separation between content management and design updates
  • a vastly better (i.e. more performant and accessible) technical implementation
  • a blog, and archiving of email newsletters and past announcements, like visiting artists (aka a content engine)
  • a vastly improved flow for booking seats in group classes
  • a more useful site-wide search

collect.erinhoffman.com

Erin Hoffman is an artist originally from Philadelphia, now based in San Jose, CA.

She specializes in glass art, and commissioned me to build an online store so she could sell some of her designs.

I designed it, then built with Remix, Shopify's GraphQL Storefront API, and DaisyUI.

Fathom

Fathom is a unique podcast player that uses AI to present podcasts in a whole different way. Fathom will give you captions, a full transcript, chapters, and the “best of” highlights for podcast episodes—even if the podcaster didn’t create them. It’s a fantastic way to discover new podcasts, since you can preview the latest episodes via AI-generated highlights and find related podcast episodes easily.

I did a ton of the iOS app design for Fathom v2, working closely with the CDO. I worked across the product funnel, starting with a fresh canvas, all the way to making sure developer handoff went smoothly.

Fathom is a four-person troop, and I’m one of the two designers/product guys (including CDO).

I also conducted user interviews using userinterviews.com throughout the design process.

Podium

Podium is actually the same company as Fathom, but after a hard pivot.

With Podium, we essentially took the same AI magic that Fathom brought to the podcast listener, but directly to the podcaster instead.

With Podium, the podcaster will be able to upload episodes before publishing, and use the Podium UI to build their show notes, generate chapters, audiograms, and more in-app.

Like Fathom, Podium being an AI-first tool brought about fresh and challenging design puzzles:

  • "Where do we allow users to re-generate AI-written content?"
  • "How might the user fine-tune AI text output?"
  • How do we properly represent AI variations on things like episode titles?

Misc. graphic design

For about six years I played music under the moniker ATOMO in my hometown, Louisville KY. I designed posters for my own shows and cassette art for my albums, as well as being commissioned by other local artists/record labels to do the same.

I loved doing this. It was a fun blend of screenprinting, photoshop, illustrator, and in some cases—just tearing up paper and glueing it together.

whoami

I’m a builder who’s had a lifelong curiosity for other builders, going as far back as my childhood admiration of designers such as Dieter Rams and Massimo Vignelli, or the Pixar storytellers and animators, including Brad Bird and John Lassetter.

I’m obsessed with understanding how everything fits together, and feel the best way to understand the whole system is to participate in as much of it as possible. The only thing more important than understanding all the parts of a system, is understanding the relationships between those parts. (Naturally, this goes for everyday people, too.)

I admire software engineering as a craft and discipline, and am constantly excited at the prospect of helping distill “best practices” in what is ultimately still a nascent industry.

Most everyday people have a negative perception of technology and software, and they have every right to think so. Most of it is bloated, slow, and invasive. My mission is to create lean, fast, organic, and respectful software so that hopefully one day everyday people’s perception of software change for the better, and the internet becomes more a place we visit, and less a place we live.

TLDR

  • Co-founded a web app whose goal was to cultivate nuanced, good-faith, long-form intellectual discussion. (Served as product/design engineer.)
  • I love web technologies. The web is beautiful because it’s public and open. More important than being slick and pixel-perfect (folly for a frameless medium), good web services should be lean, accessible, and anti-fragile.
  • Solid engineering and solid UX are the same. I take performance, reliability, and code clarity very seriously, and almost always from the perspective of the end user. Everything is about trust.
  • Nimble generalist. I love writing code across the stack, designing mockups, and talking to customers. (But I really love writing code/building the thing.)
  • Holistic problem-solver. Avoiding holistic solutions just creates more problems later.
  • Only interested in providing real value. Most apps are disposable or replaceable. These ones are not: Loom, Notion, Substack, Intercom, Dropbox, Waking Up, Excel.
  • Start with questions. I approach all unknowns/challenges with questions, not statements or assumptions. Questions expand possibilities, while statements limit them.
  • The internet is a place you visit, not a place you live.

Reading

Book cover for the book User Friendly by Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant.

User Friendly

Whether or not you care for the design discipline, this book is phenomenally written. Masterful journalism and storytelling deliver Mariana-Trench-level deep insights into the human mind and its biases, illustrating why the origins of user-friendliness had far more to do with life and death, instead of mere aesthetics or convenience.

This site

This site was built using Astro.

Typefaces used are Futura PT and Apolline Std, using a CSS-native fluid type scale system ala utopia.fyi

This site was also a fun exercise in practicing CUBE CSS and thinking in terms of layout primitives.