ivan.boston

Ivan

Fullstack engineer in Boston, MA.

I build systems that absorb complexity so users don't. Backend in Rust and Python, frontend in TypeScript, and a glob of infrastructure holding it all together.

Open to interesting problems.
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Selected work

01

Titanic

Upload videos to a home media server from a web page, built with minimal friction + zero trust in mind.

Titanic: trust, but verify (or... don't trust at all?)

After daily game nights, I wanted to clip, remember, and share the good times. Here's the path a memory takes before ending up safely in my home server, optimized for user simplicity :)

  1. Browser

    The uploader’s device (desktop or mobile)

    Public internet

    1. 01 Upload page One button
    2. 02 Firebase Auth ID + App Check tokens

    HTTPS · HTTP/3

  2. VPS edge

    Ampere A1 VPS

    Public internet

    1. 03 Caddy TLS, security headers
    2. 04 Quart Verifies auth → saves
    3. 05 Redis + RQ Process queue
    4. 06 ffmpeg Mic denoise, H.264 → H.265

    Tailscale tailnet

    Single allowed host:port over Tailscale, no extra surface area

  3. Home server

    An Umbrel box at home

    Tailnet only - no public ports

    1. 07 Axum Verifies auth → saves
    2. 08 Plex Serves the video
2× independently authenticated hops, zero trust
20 GB uploads streamed to disk for low memory footprint
H.265 transcoded at the edge for storage efficiency, and because my 2012 Mac mini running umbrelOS would melt down

Bonus: everything's wrapped in Sentry for maximal visibility, and eleven GitHub Actions workflows provide CD for all 4 components (and more).
0 ports exposed at home
73h of video processed
33% smaller after transcode
  • Zero-trust: Firebase Auth front door, hardened Alpine container w/ Caddy TLS, firewalld-restricted VPS, AppCheck'd endpoints.
  • Tailscale to hide home network: tag-based ACLs scopped to 1 host:port.
  • The VPS edge handles H.264 -> H.265 + audio processing, keeping the load off the home server.
  • Rust
  • Axum
  • Tokio
  • Python
  • Quart
  • React
  • Vite
  • Tailscale
  • Caddy
  • Docker
  • Firebase
  • Sentry
02

rv-extract

A multi-signal pipeline that finds the funny moments in 17 hours of unindexed gameplay footage, plus a multiplayer review tool for judging them.

17h footage ingested
875 candidates surfaced
−68% review time after tuning
  • WhisperX large-v3 transcription, word alignment, and pyannote diarization, sequential to save my poor RTX 2060.
  • Audio scorers (RMS, F0, speaker overlap, YAMNet sound classes) and lexical scorers are rank-normalized and fused into a ranked list with per-signal attribution.
  • Review UI with live multiplayer voting over SSE, semantic transcript search on local embeddings, and non-destructive trim overlays.
  • Python
  • WhisperX
  • pyannote
  • YAMNet
  • FastAPI
  • React
  • Tailwind
  • bun
  • Firebase
  • Tailscale Funnel
Private repository — happy to walk through it.
03

paper

Puts your own iPhone video in macOS's aerial wallpaper slot by matching Apple's undocumentd video format.

152 MB down from 15.6 GB, and better looking
7 builds tested, one piece removed from each
0 bytes copied from Apple’s files
  • When macOS doesn't like a wallpaper file it just goes black. I worked out what it actually wants, and wrote a tool that builds it from any clip.
  • Wrote a test harness that installs a build, makes macOS redraw the wallpaper, and scores what came out. Verification became one command.
  • Removed one piece of the file at a time to see which parts the engine actually needs. Most of what I'd been copying from Apple turned out not to matter.
  • Python
  • HEVC
  • ISO-BMFF
  • ffmpeg
  • x265
  • VideoToolbox
  • pytest

Also built

Real-time multiplayer party game

Replaces the physical components (I kept forgetting them at home) of the board game Secret Hitler so 5–10 can play from their phones.

Server side logic (no cheating) e2e w/Playwright.

React TypeScript Firestore Tailwind Playwright Sentry sh.ivan.boston

Horizon

Anti-cheat for Minecraft servers, built with an international team.

Consistent detection of 22 distinct cheats by enforcing standard packet protocol. 45,000+ downloads.

Java Bukkit SpigotMC

Mood-based playlist curation

Mobile app that reads your facial expression and builds a Spotify playlist to match.

Won “Most Creative Use of GitHub” at HackHarvard 2022. Also factors in time, weather, and location.

Flutter Dart Python Spotify API Source

Transparent charity donations

Decentralized donation platform where every contribution is tracked and verifiable on-chain.

Built on Soroban/Stellar for the Consensus 2024 hackathon.

Rust Soroban Stellar Source

Experience

Feb 2026 — present

Associate Software Engineer · Fidelity Investments

  • Automate manual governance process, improving approval timelines from 2 weeks → 10 minutes.
  • Deliver >85% frontend a11y coverage with Jenkins over 13 pages and 5 environments.
  • Enforce 23+ enterprise standards for 750 APIs and 1600 developers.
Summer 2025

Software Engineering Intern · Fidelity Investments

  • Resolve bugs on a high-traffic Angular page serving 1.6M+ monthly active users.
  • Write Jest tests to hold the page at 100% coverage.
  • Ship PRs through two internal environments.
Summer 2024

Software Engineering Intern · Fidelity Investments

  • Built a deployment plugin backed by AWS that made artifact deployment 3× faster.
  • Migrated from deprecated community libraries to first-party ones.
Summer 2023

Software Engineer · Source Development Hub

  • Architected a system to process and analyze shelter call data with NLP for better social services alloation in New Haven, CT.
  • Designed endpoints that insert into Microsoft SQL Server dynamically, plus the React front end for data entry.
Oct 2022 — Jun 2023

Software Engineer · Hack4Impact BU

  • Built a React Native app addressing coastal pollution through local engagement, for a 501(c)(3).
  • Automated CI workflows that held documentation coverage at 100%.

Education

Boston University

College of Arts & Sciences

B.S. Computer Science

December 2025

Honors

  • Upsilon Pi Epsilon — computer science honor society

Coursework

  • Distributed Systems
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Data Structures & Algorithms
  • Analysis of Algorithms
  • Software Engineering
  • Cybersecurity
  • Web Development
  • Probability in Computing
  • Computer Systems
  • Programming Languages
  • Rust: Theory & Practice
  • Embedded Systems
  • Blockchains & Applications

Involved with

Tools

Languages

  • Rust
  • TypeScript
  • Python
  • Java
  • Go
  • Swift
  • Dart
  • SQL

Frontend

  • React
  • React Native
  • Astro
  • Tailwind
  • Vite
  • Angular

Backend

  • Axum
  • Tokio
  • FastAPI
  • Quart
  • Node.js
  • .NET
  • REST

Infrastructure

  • Docker
  • AWS
  • GCP
  • Firebase
  • Tailscale
  • Caddy
  • GitHub Actions
  • Linux

Practice

  • Jest
  • Playwright
  • pytest
  • Sentry
  • CI/CD
  • Agile

Get in touch

Open to interesting problems. If you are building something that sounds hard, I want to hear about it.

ivank@bu.edu GitHub LinkedIn