Nick Sweeting

Nick Sweeting

Oakland, California, United States
2K followers 500+ connections

Join to view profile
The Recurse Center

About

I'm a top-down learner, generalist problem-solver, and full-stack software…

Services

Request proposal

Activity

Join now to see all activity

Experience

  • Browserbase Graphic

    Browserbase

    San Francisco, California, United States

  • -

    San Francisco Bay Area

  • -

    Oakland, California, United States

  • -

    Lisbon, Portugal

  • -

    Oakland, California, United States

  • -

    Montreal, Quebec, Canada

  • -

    New York City, New York, United States

  • -

    San Francisco, California, United States

  • -

    Mountain View, California, United States

  • -

    Portland, Oregon Area

  • -

    Portland, NYC, Shanghai

  • -

    Shanghai City, China

  • -

    Shanghai, China

  • -

    Shanghai City, China

Education

  • The Recurse Center

    -

    -

    Activities and Societies: Mesh networking protocol development, TCP/IP experimentation, Bitcoin, Namecoin, some python internals (AST, bytecode, tokenizer customization), hardware (sound-reactive LED installations), introductory cryptography, introductory machine learning

    A self-directed "writer's retreat" for programmers, where people of all ages and backgrounds mingle and work intensively on open source projects for 3 months. No curriculum, no teachers, no classes, just peers talking together and working on projects, with demo days and talks from residents, guest speakers, and alumni.

  • -

Volunteer Experience

  • Armchair security & FOI activist / FOSS Maintainer

    Internet Archiving, Data Freedom, and Security

    - Present 12 years 11 months

    Civil Rights and Social Action

    I focus my efforts on open-source and public information/digital preservation/security activism, and my projects generally reflect that by being about internet archiving, alternative/mesh networking, security awareness, and privacy.

    Security and Information freedom:

    - https://archivebox.io
    - https://freevpn.club
    - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/20/business/equifax-fake-website.html
    - https://github.com/pirate/sites-using-cloudflare/blob/master/README.md
    -…

    I focus my efforts on open-source and public information/digital preservation/security activism, and my projects generally reflect that by being about internet archiving, alternative/mesh networking, security awareness, and privacy.

    Security and Information freedom:

    - https://archivebox.io
    - https://freevpn.club
    - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/20/business/equifax-fake-website.html
    - https://github.com/pirate/sites-using-cloudflare/blob/master/README.md
    - https://invalidpatent.wordpress.com/2016/12/08/how-an-attacker-can-lock-you-out-of-your-icloud-account/

    Some of the open source projects I've created:
    - https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox
    - https://github.com/pirate/good-karma-kit
    - https://github.com/pirate/wireguard-docs
    - https://github.com/pirate/solana-dns
    - https://github.com/pirate/security-growler
    - https://github.com/pirate/mesh-botnet
    - https://github.com/pirate/WebRTCChat
    - and more on https://docs.sweeting.me/s/blog

  • Co-Founder / President

    Make512 Maker Group

    - 1 year 3 months

    Science and Technology

    https://make512.weebly.com/about-us.html
    https://make512.weebly.com/leadership.html
    http://www.newtalksh.com/issue/2012-07/youth-talk-makerspace-teens-shanghai

    A student organization founded by high schoolers with interests in science and engineering, make512 provides an outlet for people who have strong passion for simply making stuff. The idea for make512 started in a little inter-school skype chat and blossomed into weekly meetings and eventually a multi-school organization…

    https://make512.weebly.com/about-us.html
    https://make512.weebly.com/leadership.html
    http://www.newtalksh.com/issue/2012-07/youth-talk-makerspace-teens-shanghai

    A student organization founded by high schoolers with interests in science and engineering, make512 provides an outlet for people who have strong passion for simply making stuff. The idea for make512 started in a little inter-school skype chat and blossomed into weekly meetings and eventually a multi-school organization throughout Shanghai. This team engaged in technology education projects, teaching students soldering, programming, and systems administration, and working on interesting community art projects that benefitted the schools. They focused on projects that used recycled materials as much as possible, creating things such as LED cubes, custom game controllers, motorized cargo tricycles, and sound-reactive lighting installations.

  • Shanghai Roots & Shoots Graphic

    Volunteer

    Shanghai Roots & Shoots

    - 6 months

    Environment

    Volunteered for the Million Tree Project in China via the Shanghai Community Intl. School.

  • LEGO Education Graphic

    Volunteer Teacher

    LEGO Education

    - 3 months

    Education

    Taught children in Shanghai how to program LEGO mindstorms units and do basic robotics.

Publications

  • Archiving the Internet Before it All Rots Away

    Talk at PyGotham and PyCon Colombia

    Could you imagine an internet where all links stopped working after 4 years? All the old blogs from the 90’s… gone, all your hot takes on Twitter… gone, all the news and reporting… gone.

    Some of that decay is good, no one wants the entire internet to be preserved for eternity, but most of that decay leads to great content disappearing forever, and future generations being deprived of access to the most important medium for knowledge in the last half century. If no one worked on…

    Could you imagine an internet where all links stopped working after 4 years? All the old blogs from the 90’s… gone, all your hot takes on Twitter… gone, all the news and reporting… gone.

    Some of that decay is good, no one wants the entire internet to be preserved for eternity, but most of that decay leads to great content disappearing forever, and future generations being deprived of access to the most important medium for knowledge in the last half century. If no one worked on preserving that information, the human race would be facing a loss of knowledge many times greater than the burning of the Library of Alexandria.

    Luckily organizations like Archive.org and the Internet Preservation Consortium work tirelessly every day to save what they can. But archiving doesn’t have to be exclusive to big organizations, we can all play a part by archiving the stuff that matters to us locally. Learn about the internet archiving community, the tools of the trade, and how to save content you care about in this talk!

    See publication

  • Database Integrity in Django: Safely Handling Critical Data in Distributed Systems

    Talk at PyGotham and PyCon Colombia

    AKA: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love atomic(): Banking Blunders and Concurrency Challenges
    How to deal with concurrency, money, and log-structured data in the Django ORM

    See publication

Courses

  • AP Computer Science

    AP Curriculum using Java

  • C++ & Data Structures

    Portland CC: CS163

  • Developing iOS 8 Apps with Swift

    Stanford on iTunes U

  • Mathematics for Computer Science

    MIT OpenCourse: 6.042J

  • Modern Physics: Quantum Mechanics

    Stanford:Leonard Susskind

  • Neuroscience: Drugs & The Brain

    Caltech:Henry Lester

Projects

  • Box

    Box is an online file sharing and cloud content management service for businesses.

    The integration with Box lets doctors and clinical staff who are users of drchrono securely store, share and collaborate on patient's medical records, lab reports and image.

    drchrono users can extract a patient summary from the drchrono medical record application and securely share it with the patient using a Box folder thereby meeting the Meaningful Use Stage 1 and Stage 2 criteria for being able…

    Box is an online file sharing and cloud content management service for businesses.

    The integration with Box lets doctors and clinical staff who are users of drchrono securely store, share and collaborate on patient's medical records, lab reports and image.

    drchrono users can extract a patient summary from the drchrono medical record application and securely share it with the patient using a Box folder thereby meeting the Meaningful Use Stage 1 and Stage 2 criteria for being able to share medical records with a patient.

    Other creators
    See project

  • ExpoSpot

    -

    Game-changing iBeacon integration for conferences, trade shows, and expos.

    Other creators
    • Justin Kravitz
    See project

  • Mesh Networking

    -

    I've re-implemented the standard networking stack in Python, the interface lets you create virtual nodes and links to simulate a mesh network between computers. There is a web GUI, as well as a command-line interface that lets computers talk over UDP, Wifi, IRC, and eventually Bluetooth.

    See project

  • Py-Medusa Open Botnet

    -

    Taking concepts from the hacking book "Violent Python", I developed an open-source botnet which allows for control of mac and linux hosts over IRC and Wifi. The bot is not installed as a virus, it's only being tested on my own VMs and is a learning-experience project only.

    See project

  • Security Growler OS X App

    -

    I developed a Mac OS X application that alerts users whenever Sudo, SSH, FTP, VNC, or AFP authentication events occur. This allows you to keep tabs on your computers resources to make sure no unauthorized use is occurring when you're on untrusted networks.

    See project

Languages

  • English

    Native or bilingual proficiency

  • Chinese

    Limited working proficiency

  • Spanish

    Elementary proficiency

Organizations

  • Recurse Center

    Graduate

    - Present

  • Make512

    Founder

    - Present

    I cofounded a student hackerspace/makerspace organization at the Concordia Internal School in Shanghai. We worked on projects such as LED cubes, bike-mounted flamethrowers, and led a weekly soldering and hardware hacking workshop open to all students.

Recommendations received

4 people have recommended Nick

Join now to view

More activity by Nick

View Nick’s full profile

  • See who you know in common
  • Get introduced
  • Contact Nick directly
Join to view full profile

Other similar profiles

Explore more posts

Explore top content on LinkedIn

Find curated posts and insights for relevant topics all in one place.

View top content

Add new skills with these courses

See all courses