David Nugent's Portfolio

To understand my career path and attributes, a good starting point is my education at secondary school level. I used the Irish equivalent of the SATs, the Leaving Certificate, as an opportunity to prove myself and gain confidence. I got the maximum number of points possible, 625, which means I scored over 90% in six varying subjects. Another confidence boost for me came unexpectedly, when I was one of three students in Ireland to get 100% in the Applied Mathematics exam.

For university, I chose to study Computer Science, because I had tried out programming a few times before and felt that I had a natural talent for it. Being a Dubliner, Trinity College was my destination.

Trinity has a historic set of exams that students can sit in second year, named Schols, which give people the opportunity to gain a full five-year scholarship, along with accommodation and meals. I really wanted to move out, so I gave it everything I had. I managed to win the scholarship, placing first in Computer Science.

After I got Schols, I wanted to start prioritizing creation over examination. When the first covid lockdown happened, I kept myself occupied by doing some online courses in AI. I then made a mobile app named BarPath which uses AI to track the path that a barbell takes during weightlifting. The more straight the path, the more efficient the lift. This was my first time training an AI model, and also my first time making a free product which was used and enjoyed by real people.

During the third year of my degree, I got involved with a new self-driving racecar team in Trinity, Formula Trinity Autonomous. Making new friends on this team got me through the remaining lockdowns. It was so much fun to work with like-minded people, while learning about autonomous vehicles. That year, I was the Perception Lead.

The highlight of our year was running the AI Grand Prix, a virtual autonomous racing competition for college students. Installing robotics software was a big barrier to entry, so I developed a system which allowed competitors to write a simple Python script which took LiDAR data as input, and output a speed and steering angle, abstracting everything else away from them.

Meanwhile, to earn some money, I had been correcting Applied Maths exams for my old teacher, Oliver Murphy. When he decided to write his new textbook, he took me on board to write the teacher's solutions to the book's questions, and to provide suggestions about its contents.

At the end of third year, I felt it was time for some industry experience, so I applied for an internship in Evervault, an early-stage cryptography startup in Dublin. Their interview process at that time involved choosing a project from their website. I didn't know what they were expecting, and I felt afraid of not impressing them enough, so I tried to get it done as soon as possible, to a high standard. The result was a Python implementation of the Raft consensus algorithm, written in less than two days.

That summer, as Evervault's sixth employee, I experienced the intensity, pressure, and excitement of an early stage startup. I also became proficient in Rust, which helped me to mature as a programmer.

When I returned to college for my final year, the Autonomous team was finally working together in-person. This year, I got to lead the team with two of my best friends. I was tasked with leading the software engineering, which gave me the chance to take the skills I'd learned in Evervault, and use them in my own leadership style.

Our first competition was F1Tenth, in Prague, where we programmed an autonomous RC car to whir around the track autonomously. We were really proud about this, because we'd only received the vehicle six days before the competition.

A few months later, we competed at the Formula Student AI competition at the Silverstone Formula 1 racetrack. We won the Best Newcomer award, which we were chuffed with, because this competition had been the target of the Autonomous team since its inception.

For my undergrad thesis, I combined my interest in AI with my newfound cryptography interest, by proposing my own idea: using homomorphic encryption in credit card fraud detection AI models. It has two citations!

When I graduated with a First, I went back to Evervault for a year. I wanted to try out the forty-hour-a-week lifestyle of a career software engineer. I think Evervault was a great place to do that, because they have a combination of interesting, challenging, technical work along with the stability of venture capital funding. It also gave me the chance to sit beside and learn from excellent engineers.

I began working on the Enclaves team, where we built Evervault's confidential computing solution. Once that product was launched, I got to lead a couple of projects myself: File Encryption and Optimizing the Encryption Engine. I had previously led teams in Formula Trinity, but this assured me that I could also do it in the 'real world'.

When working at the cutting edge, I often have ideas that I want to put in writing. Here are a few of the blog posts I made for Evervault about topics I found important or interesting.

I felt that I had ideas which I couldn't explore while I was working full-time for one company. AI was also causing the world of software engineering to be in constant flux, and I wanted to experiment with my own ways of working with it.

I decided to start freelancing. I think it has been the right choice so far, as I have been able to learn lots of new skills, express my creativity, and I've been happier. For IP reasons, I can't discuss every project I've done as a freelancer, but some of the skills I've picked up include WebGL, WebAssembly, ThreeJS, Unity, Prompt Engineering and more. AI has helped me to learn these new skills a lot quicker.

I continued doing some technical writing for Evervault. This gave me a chance to play with my passion for education. I wrote some blog posts that combined text with other mediums, such as code, diagrams, and most importantly – mathematical visualizations.

I had made educational material before, but it was all based around autonomous vehicles.

The maths visualizations I was doing in my new blog posts put me in contact with the founder of Retainit, a startup which is building games to help people retain important information. Retainit has been my most consistent client as a freelancer so far.

An early collaborator with Retainit is 3Blue1Brown, the biggest maths YouTuber (6M+ subs), whose maths software I had used in my blog posts. We've made games for his viewers which feature interactive maths components, to ensure that they get to exercise the tinkering parts of their brains. They were very well received!

One of the luxuries of my flexible schedule is that I have time to mentor young people in technology, something I find very fulfilling.