After graduating this weekend, I'll be joining @modal as a Developer Relations Engineer!
I want to describe how I got here, as my path was rather unconventional.
My first "connection" to Modal was back in 2022: after graduating high school, I took @charles_irl's Full Stack Deep Learning course, where I created admirer, a flavor of a VLM powered by AWS Lambda and GPT-3 (for those who remember!). I suppose my age and being a one-person team left an impression on him, and we continued to stay in touch.
When he discovered Modal, I quickly became a user and found it just so delightful and easy to use. Plus, the free $30/month was more than enough for personal projects and experimentation, and I was always telling others to try it out. In fact, during a summer internship at an edtech startup, I helped secure a $5000 grant that allowed us to switch from <anon-cloud-provider> to Modal for our fine-tuning and deployment jobs.
Last summer, Charles unexpectedly offered an internship on the growth team, where I was initially uncertain how I'd use my full-stack ML experience at an infrastructure company. As it turned out, quite nicely: while contributing to the wide-ranging (and actually helpful!) set of examples (https://modal.com/docs/examples), I quickly saw that a sufficiently useful and captivating example empowered devs to take the next step. Soon after, I was tasked with showing how to mesh together RL, LLMs, and Modal Sandboxes. After a weekend or two of experimentation, I came up with a web demo of Street Fighter III where you could play against an RL-trained Qwen 3-8B (btw, you can try it out here: https://andrewhinh--sf3.modal.run/). The most fun part for me, besides getting it to work as well as it did, was seeing the joy and excitement from the team.
What makes me so excited to rejoin is that, really, I'm just continuing where I left off last summer to spread the good word about Modal. I can't thank Charles, @bernhardsson, @akshat_b, and the team at Modal enough for the opportunity to do so. Stay tuned for more!
