About – Wemi Moyela's website

I’m a software developer working on cross platform mobile and web applications with a variety of technologies including React, Node.js and Ruby on Rails.

If you’d like to contact me for work or with any questions please reach out via my listed email.

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My name is Slim (you can call me this), and I am a computer scientist. I am either a research scientist at Notion or a PhD student at UC Berkeley, advised by Sarah Chasins under the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Fellowship. I live in San Francisco.

My research interests span programming languages, type theory, and human factors. I study programming languages as user interfaces: in short, how the syntactic and semantic properties of a language shape the way people reason about and write programs in the real world. Recently my focus has narrowed to making highly expressive type systems more usable in general-purpose, industrial settings. As both an academic and practitioner, my goal is to meaningfully improve the state of practice via theoretically compelling formalisms, substantiated by rigorous empirical methods and user-centered design.

Previously I collaborated with Ink & Switch on rich text CRDTs; was one of the first ten engineers at Notion; worked in the Early Product Development research group at Khan Academy led by May-Li Khoe and Andy Matuschak; and interned with the Human Experience and Design group at Microsoft Research Cambridge.

I received my BA in Computer Science from Northwestern University, concentrating in human-computer interaction and theoretical computer science. My studies were supported by scholarships from Google, Microsoft, Palantir, Box, Quip, and others, for which I am grateful, though these companies do not necessarily represent my views. During undergrad I was affiliated with the following research groups:

Design, Technology, and Research, where I researched CSS inspection with my co-advisors Haoqi Zhang and Nell O’Rourke. My work on semantic dependencies in CSS inspection was incorporated into both the Firefox and Chrome DevTools, and received Best Paper Honorable Mention at UIST 2018.
CS Theory Group, where I researched peer grading algorithms with Jason Hartline.
Center for Connected Learning, where I worked on NetLogo Web with Jason Bertsche.

I have a lot of hobbies:

I am a classically-trained flutist and avid enjoyer of classical music.
I have ridden every Amtrak long-distance route with a West Coast terminus: the California Zephyr twice, Coast Starlight seven times, and the Sunset Limited, Empire Builder, and Southwest Chief once each.
I coach competitive policy debate for Interlake High School, where I founded the team in 2011, and Northwestern University, where I was part of the team during our historic 15th national championship. Debate has shaped me profoundly, and bootstrapping a high school team with no resources or coaching remains the hardest thing I have ever accomplished.

My other interests include figure skating, midcentury furniture design, typography, browser engines, type systems, text editors, Nix, WebAssembly, Rust, Haskell, crossword puzzles, document preparation, coiling and soldering custom USB cables, the Nintendo Switch, ultralight backpacking, jazz, wilderness emergency medicine, and critical theory.

Here are a few of my 95 theses:

You can find more on my blog.