Zeeshan Lakhani is a Staff Researcher Engineer at Fission, working on local-first software, and leading efforts on Homestar, an open-world compute engine related to IPVM and Wasm execution. Additionally, he is co-founder and organizer of Papers We Love and PWLConf and a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science, studying Programming Language Theory. Formerly, he was director of fraud engineering and strategic research at BlockFi, drove programmable networking at Comcast, worked on impactful distributed systems at Basho, co-wrote the Readability 2.0 iOS app while at Arc90, and helped drive interactive content at NYPL Labs.