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TLDR

My name is Julian Griggs and I am a professional software engineer living in San Francisco. I like lifting weights, eating good food, practicing meditation, and learning new things. This blog is a place for me to collect (and hopefully clarify) my thoughts on various topics.

Distilling the essence of who you are into a short “about page” is surprisingly hard – so consider this a work in progress.

Professional

I currently am a Senior Software Engineer at Netflix where I work on Observability products to help Netflix engineering continue to deliver the best possible product experiences for our members.

Before Netflix, I was a Senior Software Engineer and Tech Lead at Headspace Health where I focused primarily on Headspace’s enterprise offering. Headspace Health was an amazing company to work at, and their mission to improve the health and happiness of the world is one that I’m still passionate about.

Before Headspace Health I worked as a Software Engineer at Lightstep where our mission was to help engineers observe their applications with confidence, at scale. At Lightstep I had the opportunity to work with incredible people on some really interesting problems. I worked all throughout the stack from the front-end React/Redux application to the data-processing back-end services, to the core infrastructure & networking layer.

Before Lightstep, I worked at Course Hero in what was my first full-time software engineering job. While at Course Hero, I primarily worked on the Proprietary Content team, with a little over a year spent as that team’s Tech Lead. Our team, working in close coordination with the Content Development team, created compelling study guides and infographics that helped students “master their classes”.

Interests

For the vast majority of my life, I identified as a soccer player first and foremost. But things change, and after an unfortunate series of concussions, I have officially “hung up the boots” and am enjoying retirement. I love watching sports – particularly soccer and basketball where my allegiances are summed up by:

GLORY GLORY MAN UNITED & WAAARRRIIOORRRSSS

I’m fascinated by meditation and try to maintain a daily practice. It significantly impacts my happiness and well being. For those new to medidation, I highly recommend Headspace. If you like that, and want to deepen your theoretical understanding of mindfulness practice, I recommend the instruction Sam Harris provides in his Waking Up app. The two supplement each other well.

Recently, I’ve been playing a fair amount of pickleball and have big dreams of playing in the US Open. Give me a few more months and I’ll get there.

Education

I graduated from Princeton University in 2015 with a degree in Computer Science. During my senior year, I wrote a thesis on the automatic summarization of text which was advised by Dr. Ananda Gunawardena. I was a member of the varsity soccer team, an affiliation that was core to my identity during school and remains so to this day and was a member of University Cottage Club. The people I met through these affiliations remain some of my closest friends today.