Behavioral Interview Prep
I’m prepping for my behavioral interview questions and thought it couldn’t hurt to publish them for future reference or to share around.
Tell me about yourself.
My digital health software engineering arc really started back in highschool, when I developed the hardware and neural networks to record and classify EKG waveforms, such as tachycardias, bradycardias, escape, and premature beats, etc. I was fascinated by the potential of already existing data, that you could have a positive impact on health by simply recognizing and extracting the patterns which already existed. That interest carried me to MIT where I majored in Brain and Cognitive Science to support a career at the intersection of healthcare and software.
…Spinning up new Python projects with cookiecutter
Batteries are, in fact, not included in a modern Python environment. The missing components include:
- Package / project manager: uv
- Test runner: pytest
- Type checker: mypy
- Auto-documentation: mkdocs
- Auto-formatter: ruff
- Dependency validation: deptry
- LSP server: pyright
Enter cookiecutter, a tool for creating new projects from a template. A python project specific cookiecutter template allows me to quickly spin up a new project with these components included. To bring in my defaults and idiosyncrasies (e.g. emacs LSP configuration), I forked cookiecutter-uv
. To use it the first time call:
Co-Founding Regard
I was the technical co-founder and CTO at Regard, a digital health company I helped bootstrap and grow alongside my two co-founders, Eli (CEO) and Nate (COO / Sales). Today, Regard has found its clinical niche: post a $360M series B valuation it’s used in over ten health systems and has assisted with more than seven million notes.
But back in 2016, before it was a company, before we knew what a clinical note was, it was just the three of us in search of a problem. The classic startup inversion of cause and effect.
…The Moulia Basque Emigrants
My father, Thomas Armand Moulia, pulled the Ellis Island passenger manifests from 1913 documenting when his grandfather, Armand Moulia, came to the states. Armand was ten years old at the time and travelling in the care of his fourteen year old sister, Julie. My father was trying to trace Armand and Julie’s origins, however the records of origin and destination are phonetically misspelled, likely because they were young and only spoke Basque. To figure out where old Armand Senior came from, we’ve been trying to decipher them.
…Calling MCP tools from Emacs
A few months ago I daydreamed bridging Emacs LLMs with a burgeoning ecosystem of MCP tools: being able to use websearch, run Python code within a local virtualenv, or anything off the awesome list. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) provides a protocol for integrating tools with LLM’s. Designed by Anthropic for Claude and picked up by OpenAI, it’s shaping up to be the standard for wiring up tools.
lizqwerscott/mcp.el implements an MCP client from within Emacs alongside an interface for managing connected MCP servers. Mix in a few glue functions to wire the MCP servers to karthink/gptel as gpt-tools
and your Emacs LLM now has [potentially dangerous] superpowers.