urishamay@cmpxchg16.me:~$ whoami

Hey There!

My name is Uri Shamay. I am a passionate technology enthusiast with a hacker's spirit, previously serving as a tech lead and chief architect, and startup founder. Computers and programming have been an integral part of my life since childhood, and I've immersed myself in them both as a hobby and professionally.

With two decades of experience, I've delved into polyglot programming primarily in the startup domain. I've built and architected a diverse range of systems and infrastructures in multi-cloud environments, focusing on massively distributed and high-performance setups. My past roles have also encompassed technology mentorship and leadership positions among software engineers.

One of my favorite hobbies is building & experimenting with custom hardware, specifically tailored with specialized CPUs & GPUs for compute-intensive algorithms. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I deeply respect the concept of "Mechanical Sympathy." It suggests that for the most effective use of a tool or system, one should understand how it functions at its best. As racing driver Jackie Stewart once said, "You don't have to be an engineer to be a racing driver, but you do need to have Mechanical Sympathy."

urishamay@cmpxchg16.me:~$ cat community

I volunteer as a mentor with the 8200 Alumni Association, a leading nonprofit that operates some of Israel's premier entrepreneurship, education, and tech programs.

I'm an active community contributor and public speaker. I co-founded both the Java IL and Tech Leads IL communities.

I've served as a mentor for children in tech schools, provided guidance to students from peripheral areas in the academy, and have also taken on the role of a computer science lecturer within the academic realm.

In recent years, I have been volunteering with FIRST, a global robotics community that prepares young people for the future.


urishamay@cmpxchg16.me:~$ history | tail -n 5 | tac

> [Today] Software Alchemist@Null
> --------------------------------

Research the engineering and security aspects of LLMs (Large Language Models).

> Check Point (Spectral acquisition)
> -----------------------------------

Principal Architect at Check Point. I lead the security research for the Spectral division and oversee the cloud security architecture for the entire cloud division.

> Spectral (acquired by Check Point)
> -----------------------------------

Co-Founder & Chief Architect at Spectral.
At Spectral, we empower modern teams with security solutions. Our goal is to enable teams to develop and deploy software swiftly, ensuring they steer clear of security pitfalls, credential leaks, misconfigurations, and data breaches. We also provide IaC (Infrastructure as Code) cloud scanning throughout the entire software development lifecycle.

> Next-Insurance
> ---------------

Infrastructure Architect at Next-Insurance. I spearheaded platform engineering and core infrastructure, serving as a 360-degree player, bridging the domains of Engineering, BI, and Security.

> Juno (acquired by Gett)
> ------------------------

I was the first developer and lead developer at Juno, later acquired by Gett. I played a pivotal role in building services for millions of users in the ride-sharing domain. Additionally, I spearheaded the data, BI, and fraud prevention efforts.

> Cotendo (acquired by Akamai)
> -----------------------------

I was one of the pioneering members behind the success of Cotendo. During my tenure in R&D, I held several key roles:

  • Tech Lead
  • Software & System Architect
  • Infrastructure Team Leader

  • Following Cotendo's acquisition by Akamai, I took on a pivotal role as the principal lead for the next generation of internet infrastructure. I was instrumental in building the edge server deployed across 250K locations worldwide. Subsequently, I worked in the security division, processing petabytes of data for cybersecurity products.


    urishamay@cmpxchg16.me:~$ cat rnd

    Within R&D, while I value the 'D', it's the 'R' that truly excites me. My research extensively delved into:

  • Approaches to high-performance network I/O programming, comparing lightweight threads (coroutines) with native threads.
  • Exploring coarse-grained locks and the intricacies of Transactional Synchronization within CPUs (e.g., Intel TSX) to achieve enhanced throughput in lock-based algorithms.
  • Delving into CUDA/OpenCL to understand the effective utilization of parallel algorithms via GPU parallelization.

    urishamay@cmpxchg16.me:~$ cat favorites

    My favorite topics in computer science include:

  • High-performance computing
  • Distributed computing and Big Data
  • High-performance network servers
  • Lock-free and wait-free algorithms

  • urishamay@cmpxchg16.me:~$ echo `42`

  • The best book I ever read:: The Linux Programming Interface
  • My favorite xkcd:: Ineffective Sorts
  • My favorite Abstruse Goose:: Computer Programming 101
  • The coolest hack ever:: Reflections on Trusting Trust (Ken Thompson Hack)
  • Funny stuff on theoretical vs practical in software engineering:: The Ultimate in Garbage Collection (1995)


  • urishamay@cmpxchg16.me:~$ contact me

  • GitHub:: GitHub
  • Twitter:: @cmpxchg16
  • LinkedIn:: cmpxchg16
  • Email:: shamayuri@gmail.com
  • My PGP:: cmpxchg16@gmail.com (9BAD50267BD5084C)


  • urishamay@cmpxchg16.me:~$ stack

    > Programming: C/C++, Java, Kotlin, Golang, Rust, Typescript/Node.js, Python

    > OS: Linux (+kernel), Ubuntu, CentOS, RedHat, Kali, Kubernetes, Docker, OpenShift, Istio, Helm, Podman

    > Networking: Calico, Cilium, Envoy

    > DevOps & DevSecOps: CI/CD (Jenkins, GitLab CI, Travis CI, CircleCI, ArgoCD, Flux), Terraform, Ansible, Puppet, Chef, Pulumi, Vault

    > Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Datadog, New Relic, Jaeger, Sentry

    > Frontend: React, Next.js, Tailwind CSS, WebAssembly

    > Backend: Spring Boot, Django, Flask, Express.js, FastAPI, NestJS, Micronaut

    > Architecture: Microservices (GraphQL, gRPC, API Gateways), Serverless (Lambda, Cloud Functions)

    > Data: BI (Superset, Airflow, Tableau)

    > DS & ML: Machine Learning (TensorFlow, PyTorch, Keras)

    > LLM: LangChain, LlamaIndex, Hugging Face Transformers

    > Databases & *: PostgreSQL, MySQL, Neo4J, MongoDB, Cassandra, DynamoDB, CockroachDB, Redis, Memcached, RabbitMQ

    > Servers: Apache, Haproxy, Nginx, Varnis, Squid

    > Big Data: MapReduce, Apache Spark, Apache Kafka, Apache Beam/Dataflow, Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana (ELK Stack), OpenSearch, Redshift, BigQuery

    > Cloud: Bare-Metal, AWS, GCP, Azure, DigitalOcean

    > PaaS: Heroku, DigitalOcean, Vercel, Netlify, Railway, Fly.io, Render, Cloudflare, Supabase, Firebase

    > Security: OWASP, MITRE, Penetration Testing, Ethical Hacking, SIEM tools, IDS/IPS, SCA


    P.S. In case you wish to know about the domain/nick -- here is a hint:

    __asm__ __volatile__("lock; cmpxchg16b %0;")

    urishamay@cmpxchg16.me:~$ exit