whoami

My name is Trey Gilliland and I am a full-stack software engineer based out of NYC. I studied Computer Science at Columbia University, and interned at Pinterest and Instagram before starting as a founding engineer (employee #1) at Visia for the last ~4 years. I am currently taking a sabbatical to participate in the Recurse Center.

Why I decided to make a blog

I’ve had many iterations of a personal website over the years, but it hasn’t been a focus of mine since I’ve graduated and started my career. Now that I am taking a sabbatical, I will be spending my time learning, exploring, and writing about what I find interesting. I figured no better place than my own website!

How this blog is made

I’ve spent a lot of time building web apps in React with Next.js or Vite, but recently have been reaching for Astro for content-driven sites. It’s a joy to use and is super easy to set up so it was a natural choice.

Why am I taking a sabbatical

As a founding engineer, I’ve been building across the stack to enable our products at Visia which has allowed me to work across Web, Mobile, Backend, Product, Data Engineering, DevOps, Infrastructure, Systems, ML/CV, and more.

This experience has been invaluable for me to understand how all of these technologies come together and what it takes to deliver products end-to-end. I want to use this experience to explore building my own projects end-to-end and work through the backlog of things I want to learn more about.

The Visia team is incredible (we’re hiring!) and I can’t thank them enough for the opportunity to explore on my own terms over the next N months.

What I plan to work on in my sabbatical

I will likely write a long-form post about this once I am a couple weeks in, but the TL;DR is that I want to lean in to being a true “full-stack engineer”.

I will be spending the first 6 (maybe 12!) weeks at the Recurse Center “programming at the edge of my abilities” on some of my own projects across the stack, with a focus on systems programming and developer tooling. I also want to contribute to some of my favorite open-source projects like uv and ClickHouse. Stay tuned for more!