A Word From the Founder

My résumé

Dear Prospective Client or Employer,

As the founder of Mohan Embar, Inc., I am always on the lookout for interesting opportunities. As you can see from my résumé, I have spent the last fourteen years as the primary payments and PCI compliance engineer at a SaaS platform — writing the card-data path that carries every credit-card transaction, maintaining a multithreaded C++ engine that delivers millions of emails a day, and being grilled by PCI auditors on all of it — on top of two prior decades of consulting across frameworks, desktop applications, compilers and mainframes. In every case, I have been able to adapt to the needs of the situation and ensure to the best of my ability that the project is delivered on time and with little scope creep.

I have found that many experienced developers come in two breeds. First, there are those who are good with people, but are not hardcore programmers. Then you have the hardcore developers who want to introduce their pet technologies at any cost, regardless of whether they are the most appropriate for the problem at hand or if their other teammates are experienced enough to "follow along". While I am a hardcore developer at heart, successful and on-time delivery of projects is my number one priority. This means that:

  • Excellent communications skills are more important than excellent technical skills. All development efforts are for naught if there has been miscommunication with users and/or managers.
  • Technical "coolness" must take a back seat to a solution in which all of a team's developers can understand, follow along, and be productive.
  • A good mentor must be willing to sacrifice his or her own ego and technical gratification if the other developers can't benefit from the experience and carry the project forward after the consultant is gone.
  • Getting along well ("bonding") with the users and the development team is of utmost importance.

I have approached all of my consulting projects with this philosophy and as a result, my work has been greatly appreciated. It has aged well into the AI era, too: these days I direct fleets of AI coding agents at my day job, and it turns out the same discipline that makes code trustworthy to teammates — clear communication, verification over vibes, tests that prove they bite — is exactly what makes AI-assisted output trustworthy. I won the 2012 Loebner Prize in artificial intelligence with a chatbot I wrote from scratch, so I've been at this conversation longer than most.

Although I can adapt to any situation, you will derive the most benefit from me in projects where:

  • either excellent communications and mentoring skills are necessary and the developers are less experienced technically, or
  • communications skills are less important and I am part of a small group of experienced developers in an intensive, technically-challenging development effort

I am selective about what I take on, so unfortunately I can't guarantee availability. However, if I commit to something, I will follow through on it.

If you are interested in what you've read, contact me and we'll talk more!

Mohan Embar