About Me

Disclaimer: Everything I post on this website are my views and opinions, and not those of my employer.

Hi, I’m Karan Parikh.

I code. I lift. I read. I run. I write. I listen to music. I try to be funny.

Some of my favorite books are The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut, Watchmen by Alan Moore, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah, and the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy by Liu Cixin.

My favorite bands/artists are TesseracT, The Contortionist, Gojira, Deafheaven, Skyharbor, Tame Impala, Steven Wilson, Trivium, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, and Cult Of Luna.

Pleased to meet you.

I’m 28 years old and live in San Francisco, CA. You can get in touch with me at karan.parikh1991 at gmail dot com. You can also find me on LinkedIn, GitHub, and SlideShare. My resume is available on request.

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This blog is a collection of technical and personal posts.

You can find my technical posts here. I’m interested in distributed systems, infrastructure development, large-scale software systems, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and natural language processing.

You can find my personal posts here.

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I’m currently a Senior Software Engineer at Uber on the Routing team. On November 14th 2017 I gave a tech talk about map matching at Uber. You can find a video of the talk here.

Prior to that I was a Senior Software Engineer at LinkedIn where I worked on our distributed graph database and Rest.li. Apart from that I reviewed projects and set up repositories for LinkedIn’s open source projects on GitHub and also did technical reviews for LinkedIn’s engineering blog.

I’ve spoken at QCon SF 2014 (my section begins at around the 18 minute mark).

I’ve written blog posts for the LinkedIn Engineering Blog. I’ve also been featured on it.

I graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with highest honors with a B.S. in Computer Science in May 2013.

During my undergraduate life I’ve won numerous hackathons and have interned at LinkedIn (my LinkedIn profile) and Riverbed.

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Did I mention that I love music? Since moving out to California I’ve tried to go to as many concerts as possible. Here is a list of 151 artists/bands I’ve seen live (I also wrote a post analyzing the bands I’d seen live as of 2/26/2016): alt-J, AC/DC, Afrojack, Alcest, Alesso, Amon Amarth, Anomalie, Animals As Leaders, Arch Enemy, Architects, Arctic Monkeys, Astronoid, August Burns Red, Avicii, Bad Snacks, Between the Buried and Me, Big Story, Black Map, Black Sabbath, Bonobo, Broods, Bryce Dessner, Charles Bradley and His Extraordinaires, Cage The Elephant, Calvin Harris, Chevelle, Chet Faker, CHON, Chromeo, Chvrches, Circa Survive, Cloud Nothings, Clutch, Cold War Kids, Counterparts, Crobot, David Guetta, Deafheaven, Death Cab for Cutie, Deftones, Dessa, DIIV, Dusty Brown, Electric Citizen, Elton John, Emma Ruth Rundle, Empire of the Sun, Erra, Fleet Foxes, Florence + the Machine, Foals, Foo Fighters, Ghost & the City, Gojira, Good Tiger, Haim, Haitus Kaiyote, Hardwell, Hot Chip, Hozier, In Flames, Interpol, Intronaut, Jack White, Jagwar Ma, Jai Wolf, James McAlister, Judas Priest, Kasabian, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, Kllo, Lake Street Dive, Lamb of God, LCD Soundsystem, Lindsey Stirling, Lord Huron, Lorde, Lost Frequencies, Madeon, Major Lazer, Marina and the Diamonds, Mastodon, Megadeth, Mestis, Metallica, Miike Snow, Monakr, Mondo Drag, Motorhead, Nico Muhly, Night Sea, Nothing More, Opeth, Pallbearer, Periphery, Plini, Radiohead, Red Fang, Rob Araujo, Royal Blood, Rüfüs du Sol, Run the Jewels, Sam Smith, Saxon, Scale the Summit, Shakey Graves, SikTh, Skyharbor, Silent Planet, St. Lucia, Steven Wilson, Stick To Your Guns, Stonefield, Strawberry Girls, Sufjan Stevens, Suicidal Tendencies, S U R V I V E, Tame Impala, Tegan and Sara, Tennis, TesseracT, Thank You Scientist, Thao Nguyen, The Black Keys, The Contortionist, The Flaming Lips, The Fratellis, The Killers, The Last Shadow Puppets, ORB, The Orwells, The Revivalists, The War on Drugs, The Who, This Will Destroy You, Tiesto, Toro y Moi, Toothgrinder, Tremonti, Trey Songz, Trivium, Tycho, Warpaint, Whitney, Wild Nothing, Wilson, Wolf Alice, Wolfmother, Wovenwar, and Young the Giant.

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I also love food. In 2014 I decided that I want to visit at least one Michelin starred restaurant every year. In 2014 I went to momofuku ko. In 2015 I went to Kusakabe. In 2016 I went to SPQR and Quince. In 2017 I went to Taj Campton Place Restaurant, Ren, and Hamo. In 2018 I went to Kin Khao, Benu, KEIKO à Nob Hill, Café China, Mourad, Kinjo, Commonwealth, Rich Table, Californios, and Hashiri. In 2019 I went to Lazy Bear,Nico, Gary Danko, and Mister Jiu’s.