Nathanial Hapeman

Full Stack Developer & Creative Problem Solver

I'm a developer based in Los Angeles with over a decade of experience tackling challenging problems in geospatial visualization, machine learning, and quantum computing. I thrive on complex, interesting work and love collaborating with people from different disciplines to build something greater than the sum of its parts. I'm currently a Staff Software Engineer at HRL, leading development of an automated wafer testing framework. Day to day, I work in Python and TypeScript building instrument control systems and analyzing experimental data.

Experience

My professional journey across various companies and technologies.

HRL Laboratories

Full Stack Engineer

July 2021 - Present

HRL is a world leader in silicon-based spin qubits for quantum computing. I help in many ways but primarily by leading development on an automated wafer testing framework using probers.

Lead developer on Python-based automated wafer probing framework
- Delivered multi-fold performance improvements on inherited systems, doubling wafer testing capacity
- The framework emphasizes exceptional UX without compromising test speed
- Well documented with many demos
- Mocked instruments for production testing and faster development
- Multi-system support per computer, and composite SMU capabilities
Full stack developer on quantum device testing frameworks
- Built multiple web applications for visualization and acquisition of large-scale quantum-relevant data
- Developed zoomable, interactive JavaScript canvas applications for data analysis
Recognition
- Recipient of the 2024 HRL Award for 'Work Excellence by an individual or Team on Critical Programs'
- Promoted off-cycle twice

Full StackPythonFastAPIVue.jsReactTypeScriptHardware IntegrationData VisualizationQuasarPandasSQLAlchemyNumPyHDF5PlotlySass

Applied Invention

Software Engineer

June 2014 - June 2021

Applied Invention partners with large enterprises to design and deliver solutions to complex technical challenges. Most of my work can be summarized in these three projects:

Computer Vision Aquaculture Project
- Lead architect and dev on an image annotation website
- Worked extensively with annotation team to improve the website user experience
- Imported and cleaned training data from third party sources
- Built dashboard to monitor the annotation data pipeline and annotator stats
- Developed several computer vision solutions, one of which prevented a costly human annotation step
- Worked on Pachyderm data pipeline that turned raw images into machine annotations
Rental Forecasting Project
- Helped scale rental forecasting program to run on all US locations by reducing bottlenecks
- Optimizing involved rewriting queries, parallelizing, memoizing, NumPy and profiling
- Automated model accuracy checks and used slack bots to report discrepancies and result summaries
Geospatial Simulation Development
- Worked on several GIS projects using Cesium.js, UE4 based and in-house engines
- Wrote entire file system diagnostics website for a map server
- Added support for dynamic terrain layer switching and wrote custom shaders
- Built a hotkey menu system that allows users to customize and define new hotkeys

Full StackSimulation / Game DevelopmentMachine LearningData SciencePostgreSQLAngularReactPythonFlaskJavascriptOpenCVPandasNumPyC++Sass

Featured Projects

Here are some of my favorite projects I've built just for fun. Fair warning: hobby code follows hobby rules — I promise my professional work is much cleaner ;)

Whirling

A music visualizer leveraging audio feature extraction and segmentation to generate representative visuals. Analyzes audio characteristics to create dynamic, synchronized visual effects.

PythonAudio ProcessingSpectrogramsNumPy

Code Live Demo

Drone Command & Control

A simulated drone command and control platform featuring real-time drone management, mission planning, and telemetry visualization. Full stack implementation with modern web technologies.

ReactTypeScriptGolangWebSockets

Code

Image Effects

A Jupyter notebook that contains a couple dozen image transformations, some recreating trivial Photoshop effects and others just having fun with OpenCV.

PythonOpenCVJupyter NotebookNumPy

Code Live Demo

Pacman Remake

Remake of the basics of Pacman. Funnest part was using Dijkstra's algorithm for some of the ghosts. Other ghosts move randomly.

JavaScript

Code Live Demo

Fun with React

Fun-with-react is a collection of small react examples I created to play around with React and understand the basics.

ReactTypeScriptSassclsx

Code Live Demo

Super Mario Bros Reloaded

Core features of Super Mario Bros with some slight quirks. Built using c++ and SDL before I got my first job in computer programming. Learned a ton about OOP, threading and data structures while creating this.

C++SDL

Live Demo

MyTunes: a music player

A simple music player that made it a breeze to create playlists. The first and only program I wrote in Java to this day.

JavaJavaZOOM

Live Demo

My thoughts on learning Vue

My previous personal website (v3) was the fourth major rewrite and second version written in Vue. Coming from an AngularJS background, I picked up Vue pretty easily. Here are my thoughts on the two frameworks.

Vue3SassTypeScript

Code

Minesweeper Remake

Minesweeper was one of the first games I remade as a programmer. Never played the game too much but thought it would be fun to recreate and more importantly achievable. Brace yourself for the sound effects :D

JavaScript

Live Demo

Influential Career Reads

Beyond writing code, software engineering depends on a broad set of skills: communication, persuasion, initiative, leadership, resilience, developing other leaders, aligning incentives, and staying agile without falling into bureaucracy. Books like Turn the Ship Around and No Rules Rules have shaped me in those areas. Others have pushed me to contribute to anything that strengthens my country — see Skunk Works or Apple in China.