Hi, I'm Naz 😃, a Rustacean 🦀, Systems Engineering Leader & Founder building next-generation terminal platforms and developer tooling for the AI & cloud era. Also an ex-Googler, maintainer, designer, leader, HsingI-er, racer, storyteller. I 💓 leadership, authenticity, play, and hope. I build high-performance systems infrastructure and lead teams that ship production systems.

My story #

I am equally comfortable architecting low-latency systems and writing production code, defining product vision and go-to-market execution, and building cultures of engineering excellence.

Across my 30-year tech career (hands-on software engineering throughout, alongside 10+ concurrent years in founder and executive leadership), I’ve operated across desktop, web, mobile, and cloud infrastructure. From founding and leading venture-backed startups like TRNQL ($1.5M raised) to optimizing performance, latency, and thread safety at scale on Google’s Android Studio IDE platform team, I’ve consistently built products from first commit to production scale, to product sunset.

For me technical depth and leadership don’t belong in separate silos. The best architectural decisions are grounded in product requirements stemming from user needs, and the best product visions are grounded in deep systems understanding. I build high-performance infrastructure and lead teams that turn ambitious ideas into reliable, production-grade reality that delivers genuine value.

What I’m Building at R3BL # 

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Despite the massive rise of autonomous coding agents and remote cloud VM administration, terminal UI and foundational primitives have largely stagnated since the 1990s.

I am reimagining the terminal for this era, to address the needs of LLM harnesses and ergonomic remote cloud VM admin.

The first thing I am doing is creating better primitives (r3bl-open-core aka ROC) from the ground up in Rust (2.7M+ downloads on crates.io) to bridge the gap in terminal capabilities since the 90’s.

Available today, ROC provides a strictly type-safe, correctness-focused async TUI engine, headless virtual terminal emulation (VTE), low-latency PTY/TTY runtime, CLI/TUI apps (edi, giti), MCP servers, and IDE/browser extensions.

Built on top of this open-source foundation, I’m building an upcoming closed-source suite of terminal apps at r3bl.com (which all work seamlessly over SSH). This includes a local-first collaborative “Google Docs meets Jupyter notebooks” for Markdown and virtual terminal multiplexers.

My focus is on preserving data sovereignty, privacy, and enabling local-first computing, while enhancing developer productivity, knowledge capture & sharing, and workflow management.

Architecture, Platform & Ecosystem #

  • r3bl_tui (Async TUI Engine & VTE Primitives) Open Source: Strictly type-safe async TUI engine with custom CSS/Flexbox layout & rendering engines, Elm-style state, React/JSX-style declarative macros, headless virtual terminal emulation (VTE), low-latency PTY/TTY runtime, and full-featured Markdown editor component.
  • r3bl-cmdr (Interactive CLI & TUI Apps) Open Source: Modal terminal Markdown editor (edi) and interactive Git branch & staging workflows (giti).
  • r3bl-rust-analyzer-mcp-server (AI & MCP Servers) Open Source: High-performance Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers bridging AI coding agents directly with local language servers and toolchains.
  • IDE & Browser Extensions Open Source: Suite of VS Code and Open VSX extensions for Rust development, alongside the R3BL Shortlink browser extension (Chrome and Firefox).
  • Upcoming Local-First Product Suite (r3bl.com) Closed Source: Terminal apps over SSH — collaborative Markdown editing and virtual terminal multiplexers.

What I Bring (30-Year Career) #

A track record spanning deep systems engineering, foundational infrastructure, and executive leadership:

  • Founder, Principal Systems Engineer & Maintainer, R3BL (5+ years): Architecting and building high-performance, strictly type-safe async systems, terminal platforms, and local-first developer tools in Rust.
  • Senior Software Engineer, Google (7 yrs 6 mos):
    • Android Studio IDE platform team: Performance, memory latency, and stability optimization for IntelliJ-based IDE (10M+ LOC codebase) serving millions of developers.
    • Google Maps APIs: Places API for Android SDK (Java) and Maps JavaScript/TypeScript API for Web.
    • Android Media Framework: Core Android Media OS framework and ExoPlayer (YouTube).
    • Android UX Design: Design architectures and frameworks for Android developers.
  • Technical Founder & CEO, TRNQL (1 yr 2 mos, 2015–2016):
    • Venture & Team Leadership: Founded startup, raised $1.5M in VC seed funding, recruited and managed a team of 6, set company culture, and operated the business.
    • Contextual Mobile SDKs & ML Signals: Created and shipped production Android and iOS SDKs (and the TRNQL Interplay app) that collected real-time device signals feeding ML pipelines to better understand human behavior in the real world.
    • Mobile & Cloud Architecture: Designed and coded the Android contextual-awareness SDK container and the Java cloud backend infrastructure.
  • Founder & Principal Engineer, ScreamingToaster (4 yrs 4 mos, 2007–2011):
    • Product & Agency Leadership: Founded a mobile-first product and consulting company; architected and delivered cross-platform products (BlackBerry, Android, iOS, Web) for clients including Quest Diagnostics, Mizuno USA, and HUGE Inc.
    • Award-Winning Consumer Apps: Shipped 4 apps (RainOrShine, Wicked, MyListy, DulyNoted) used by 100k+ users globally; 2× Global BlackBerry DevCon Best App in the World finalist (2009 & 2010), with RainOrShine featured in the top 5 weather apps on BlackBerry App World. Also published Android apps (ExtraTKT, StayAwake).
    • Custom PaaS, DSLs & UI Toolkits: Built a custom Tomcat-based Java PaaS cloud engine (supporting web, iOS, Android, and BlackBerry clients with integrated payments, licensing, and subscriptions), declarative DSLs with multi-platform code generators (Java, Android, BlackBerry, JS), and custom UI/animation containers.
  • Principal Engineer & Enterprise Solutions Architect (9+ years, 1997–2007): Led R&D and systems architecture across Defywire (invented US Patent US6891860B1 for mobile push/socket multiplexing, custom binary wire protocols, and mobile UI markup languages), HP, BEA Systems, SeeBeyond, Infravio, Noblestar, Nanocom, and BeanFactory (authoring the book Java and XML).
  • Full-Stack Systems Breadth: Desktop, web, mobile, IDEs, and cloud infrastructure: Rust, Kotlin, Java, Android, TypeScript, React, React Native, Node.js, Python, Firebase, SQL/NoSQL, TDD, CLI & GUI toolkits.

Teaching, Speaking & Community #

I’ve led the creation of developer narratives, tutorials, and educational programs at scale across the industry and at Google:

  • developerlife.com (est. 1998): 28 years of authoring in-depth engineering tutorials and systems architecture patterns across Rust, AI & LLMs (coding agents and MCP servers), async systems, Tokio, TUI and CLI platforms, Kotlin, Android, TypeScript, Node.js, and React.
  • YouTube Live Coding (youtube.com/@developerlifecom): Advanced Rust systems programming: async, Tokio, design patterns (typestate, newtype), concurrent and parallel programming, zero-copy parsing, and procedural macros.
  • Google Android UX Design Show & Udacity Course (400k+ combined reach): Created and hosted the UX Design for Developers YouTube show for Google Android (200k+ views) and authored the Udacity UX Design for Mobile Developers course (200k+ students).
  • Google I/O Experiential Workshops: Created and ran the first hands-on UX design workshops for developers at Google I/O 2013 and I/O 2014, hosting 2,000+ attendees.
  • Design for Humans Meetup Founder: Founded and grew a 2,000+ member Silicon Valley meetup community, presenting at 34+ monthly meetups with 4,000+ developer and designer attendees.

Patents and Books #

  • US Patent US6891860B1: Method and apparatus for establishing multiple bandwidth-limited connections for a communication device
  • Book: Java and XML (Manning Publications, May 2001, First Edition, 400 pages; ISBN-10: 188477783X, ISBN-13: 978-1884777837)