Phillippe Siclait

I’m a software engineer and entrepreneur working on making collaboration easier for 3D artists.

Writing

How does this lazy sequence work?

7 min read

I explore a succinct, corecursive definition for the sequence of prime numbers in Clojure—and how it works.

Building Raft in Clojure

10 min read

Diego Ongaro and John Ousterhout created Raft, an understandable algorithm for achieving consensus in distributed systems. In this post, I describe how I built an implementation of Raft in Clojure.

Projects

Equity for Impact

November 2020 – Present

Equity for Impact is a community of Airbnb alumni and employees who are pledging to give a portion of their equity to charitable organizations. Janet Frishberg, Andrew Vilcsak, and I built Equity for Impact with a group of volunteers in the Airbnb community, in partnership with Founders Pledge. To date, over 400 people have pledged around $50 million in shares.

Charitable giving
6.824 labs in Clojure

May 2020

6.824 is MIT’s Distributed Systems course, taught by Robert Morris. This is a direct translation of the scaffolding (tests and library code) for the course’s labs. By request of the professor, the repository doesn’t include solutions for the labs.

85 stars
Clojure
Distributed systems
“Maker weekend” illustrated stickers

April 2019

I created a set of six illustrated stickers for an event I hosted in spring of 2019.

Adobe Illustrator

Work

Clay

2021 – Present

Clay is working on making collaboration easier for 3D artists. I co-founded Clay with Sebastien Siclait, a software engineer and former Technical Director at Disney Animation (and my brother).

Convexity AI

2018 – 2019

I started Convexity to help clients build machine learning systems. Among other projects, I worked with a legal software client to build text classification and sequence labeling models to extract information from legal contracts, and set up the underlying data infrastructure.

Airbnb

2012 – 2018

I was the third engineer on the Search team and the founding engineer of the Supply Growth, Supply Quality, and AI Lab teams. While at Airbnb, I launched search ranking changes that led to a collective double digit percentage increase in bookings and I built the company’s image classification system.

The Boston Consulting Group

2011 – 2012

I consulted Fortune 500 companies on corporate strategy. Projects included helping a global pharmaceutical company manage the transition of research to contract research organizations and working with a large telecom on its three-year capital allocation plan.

MIT Computer Graphics Group

2008 – 2009

I used OpenGL and the Bullet physics engine to create 3D, real-time, dynamic computer simulations of masonry structures and their collapse. My work appeared in Emily Whiting’s 2009 Siggraph Asia paper, “Procedural Modeling of Structurally-Sound Masonry Buildings”.

© 2023 Louis Phillippe Siclait. All rights reserved