Hi, I'm @kafonek (Matt Kafonek) 👋

My first career (2003-2021) was as a domain expert in the intelligence community. I fell into it as a young enlisted USAF Arabic linguist, and kept working in the field for another decade and a half as a technical analyst bridging collections and operations across multiple three-letter agencies at a uniquely wonderful contractor Virginia Systems and Technologies (VaST, since acquired by Altamira). I began learning Python around 2010 to help automate some day-to-day tasks. As I shared what I learned with colleagues, using tools like Jupyter, I developed a passion for empowering domain experts. One part of that is providing "no-code" / "low-code" tools. An underserved need is giving them the right opportunity to begin learning and using code themselves. A neat boast that is impossible to verify without a security clearance is that I have several of the most-starred Github repositories on the "high-side" network.

My second career as a software engineer started with Noteable (since acquired by Confluent) (2021-2023), an early stage Jupyter Notebook SaaS startup who's founders I had met at Python and Jupyter conferences previously. I learned countless valuable lessons developing and deploying features for a rapidly changing user-facing product and cloud-based backend app. When OpenAI first announced its plugin store, later rebranded to custom GPTs, I worked directly on the plugin that let ChatGPT make API calls to our platform to create, edit, and execute Notebook code including seeing results or errors. It was an MCP and Agent experience before those terms were popular. A silver lining of leaving Government was getting to ride the wave of generative AI coming on the scene.

Running out of runway ironically lead me to where I'm at now: Runway (2024-present). I applied because the gen-ai experience at Noteable had been so fascinating, and I wanted to see what the process of training and productizing world models looked like. Working at Runway is incredible. The team is amazingly skilled, deeply passionate, and has a tremendous culture from leadership on down. As a Platform engineer, my day-to-day includes a lot of infrastructure generalist work like managing cloud-based development environments for researchers or building internal tooling around kueue management of our clusters to define compute quota and borrowing rules between research teams. Everyone here wears many hats as you can imagine, a description of the fast-paced challenges and responsibilities at Runway could span pages.

Rust is another special interest of mine. Python was my first love, but I'm happy that I write at least as much Rust as Python. I think it's a joy to work with. It is eating parts of the Python ecosystem, which makes me feel like a better senior Python developer for being able to dig into underlying Rust code for packages like uv, pylance, and pydantic to name a few. I would wager that in the next few years it will become a linchpin in distributed data processing and AI/ML workloads as well. I'm proud to have helped bring Rust to Runway, where it is practically a first-class language.

Outside of work I spend my time solving programming puzzles, playing video games with friends, rock climbing with my wife, being an adult leader for Cub Scouts, and taking care of our two young boys.