Hi, I'm Dennis. I'm a software engineer in Southern California, and most of what I do falls into two piles: shipping products that people use, and taking apart systems to find out how they work.

Right now I'm the first engineer at Fuerte, a startup building a mobile app for networking and event scheduling in healthcare. Being first means owning the React Native app, the deployment pipeline, and everything in between — which is a lot of responsibility and, honestly, the most fun I've had working.

Before that I built geospatial tooling at Boundary Remote Sensing Systems, and led a small web team at the Thaddeus Resource Center where I started as an intern and somehow ended up running things. I studied Computer Science at UC Irvine and graduated in 2024.

The work I come back to on my own time is language implementation — parsers, interpreters, protocol servers. I've written Lox in Go and OCaml, a Kafka broker in Rust, and a Redis server in Elixir. None of these are production systems, and that's the point. Reimplementing something that already works is the fastest way to find out which of its decisions were necessary and which were just the first thing that worked.

I've also drifted from imperative to functional over the years, mostly against my own resistance at each step. Java, then Python, then C++, then JavaScript, then OCaml — and every time, the thing I found annoying turned out to be the thing I now reach for. I wrote about that here and here.

Outside of that: audio plugins, embedded projects that win hackathons mostly on enthusiasm, and a standing interest in whatever part of a codebase nobody has opened in a year.

Say hello at dennis.lustre.dev@gmail.com or on LinkedIn. Happy to talk about compilers, functional programming, or what it's actually like being the first engineer somewhere.