I believe land use is the most important problem facing humanity in the near-term future.

Half of all North American cities are insolvent; we do not build anywhere near fast enough to support our economies.

At Arterial, we've developed a platform that lets planners build sites without needing to spend time on legislative red tape.

Hundreds of the largest development corporations and cities on the East Coast use us every day.

On the side, I study systems engineering and compilers at the University of Waterloo.

Here's a (massively abbreviated) list of things I've built over the years:

The Zephyr was a 10-day hackathon that took place onboard a set of trains and buses across the continental United States.

We took 42 hackers on a 3500 mile-long journey from Hack Club HQ in Vermont to SpaceX in Los Angeles; together, we built 623 projects - from a set of search enginers to ML papers to photo galleries.

I was the technical organizer of the trip; we built a custom deployment system on top of 150 Unifi routers across our 3 rented train cars, and used ProxMox for project orchestration—given that there wasn't any Internet for most of the trip, we wanted to make our own.

The Zephyr set the standard for what joy and community could look like in my life; nearly 4 years on, our group chats are still active. See the documentary on YouTube!

Idyllic is a programming language for writing performant web services.

It performs up to 2.5x better than an equivalent Express app on average, using 1.5x less boilerplate in example benchmarks, and ships with a CLI and two compiler components. Idyllic also hit the front page of r/ProgrammingLanguages on launch!

Socratica is a dedicated place to work on the thing closest to your heart. Every week, we bring ~100 people together to work on side projects. Every year, we host a mind-blowing Symposium.

This is absolutely the most incredible set of people I've ever been able to work with. We've had people spin out companies (including me!), learn to knit, break into research, and start their music careers at sessions - all in the same week!

We started at Waterloo in 2022, and now 30+ independent nodes exist worldwide. Check out our photo album as proof that the kids will be okay.

Legist is a web platform that allows users to digest government policy efficiently.

Legist uses near-shot categorization to sort articles and papers, BERT to identify entities in text and create a public data graph from government sources, and summarization using DistilBART, all served on top of BentoML.

Dear visitor,

Hello there. It's so nice to finally meet you.

I'm Rishi.

I hack. believe that the world can be made better in turning tacit problems into bit-based ones.

Arterial takes up most of my time today: land development is one of the biggest levers for progress available to us. Our tools for developers and planners have halved the building timelines across thousands of projects.
~ If you are an infrastructure, compiler or ML nerd, email rishi@arterial.design with your favourite project for the most interesting employment opportunity of your life.

In past lives, I wrote code and organized for other tinkerers: I'm particularly proud of my work with Socratica, Idyllic, and the Hacker Zephyr. In high school, I raised $1.8M for Otto. You can find other shenanigans on my GitHub and sometimes on the news.

You can find me at @rishiosaur on the rest of the Internet.

I'm quite active on GitHub; you can see a past version of me on Twitter. My email is rishi@arterial.design, which is the best place to reach me.