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About

Hello there. Who am I? I’m Saša Tomić (a.k.a. Sasha Tomich or Sascha Tomic or Sasa Tomic, depending on region and spelling). Yes that’s my real name. It’s not Alexander or Alex. :)

I grew up in Serbia, graduated at the School of Electrical Engineering and love tinkering with electronics. Hence the domain name - kalaj in Serbian means “tin”.

After getting my Dipl. Eng. (== 5 years, equivalent to M.Sc.), I went on to Barcelona to do a PhD in Computer Science, and joined a team led by Adrián Cristal and Osman Sabri Ünsal (under famous Mateo Valero), researching Hardware Transactional Memory in a newly formed joint research institute between Barcelona Supercomputing Center and Microsoft. It was huge fun and I learned a lot. I got my PhD from the prestigious Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya in this field, made a few solid publications (MICRO, ASPLOS), and then got a position at IBM Research Laboratory in Switzerland. I worked on the firmware for IBM FlashCore Module (press release and product page) that I enjoyed a lot. The last ~2 years of my time at IBM I worked on Storage Insights, adding support for streaming ingestion of FlashSystems storage performance metrics into the Storage Insights, for Proactive Analytics or AIOps as some call it. The part of the work that I enjoyed the most? The people. Definitely. Brilliant bunch. IBM Research Lab is an awesome place to work.

At some point DFINITY offered me a position to build the next-generation cloud that runs on a decentralized network of machines. That sounded very challenging and my knowledge of storage could help them, right? I joined DFINITY, worked on many layers of the ICP for ~2 years before the launch, then we launched the Mainnet, and then I took the steering wheel for the Mainnet Reliability team, and I stayed at that position for the next 4 years. At some point DFINITY leadership realized that AI is “eating the world” and they started building Caffeine.ai as a no-code platform for building ICP applications. For this they needed a LOT of storage and they assigned me to build the storage stack that would cleanly integrate into the ICP and give ICP apps basically unlimited amount of storage. A worthy task, finally! We had a production-worthy prototype in ~6 months, and after ~12 months the Immutable Blob Storage for ICP was fully operational. My job at DFINITY was finally done, and I am ready to look for new challenges!

What do I do in these days?

  • Spend time with my family
  • Supporting ICP and DFINITY community
  • Founding Voxtra, an AI voice assistant: https://voxtra.ch/
  • Experimenting with AI assisted coding, e.g. building https://dpay.kalaj.org/
  • Microelectronics and microcontrollers (e.g. I built a fully automated plant watering system, with esp8266)

My LinkedIn page and GitHub account.