$> ashton-river-hunt-aboutme.sh

professional about me

• I was a software engineering intern at nRF Cloud (part of Nordic Semiconductor) for the summer of '26, and previously worked at Vivint, both developing firmware.
• I did a brief stint at L3Harris developing a unified management system for Network Traffic Generators like TRex or Ixia's tech suite.
• I am a current Master's student at University of Utah.
• I am a contributor to the Rust standard library and compiler. See my commits here.
• I am a contributor to LLVM and LLVM's libc implementation. The most up-to-date versions of my work can be found here.
• I am a contributor to Panda3D through some fuzzing efforts. You can see the fuzzing setup myself and some colleagues cooked up here.
• I've taught courses on computer systems, programming languages, and computer networks.
• Personal project interests can mostly be found on my codeberg, but are typically PLdev, systems programming, and sometimes graphics programming.

professional interests

• Embedded systems. IoT in particular is here to stay, and I'm here to help it be better.
• Generally speaking, beyond IoT and embedded devices, I care immensely about cybersecurity across the board. AI has made finding vulnerabilities cheap, and I'd like to help fight critical systems failing as a result.
• Programming language theory and implementation, specifically static analysis of programs.
• Scalable systems, specifically their verification, can be pretty fascinating. A project I'd love to see/work on is a verified implementation of raft in Lean 4.

top 3 current and recent personal projects

Last updated: October 2, 2026.

• Wrote an MLIR dataflow analysis for known-bits on 8b integers. Admittedly, 8bits is rather constrained, so an eventual goal is to extend to arbitrary precision integers. Regardless, I got some interesting results. Source here.
• Extended a TUI display mode to an ollllld project I worked on to learn rust a few years ago, my CHIP-8 emulator, rite-emu.
• Myself and some friends at the University of Utah made an interactive scene editor in rust with PCSS and VAO++ shading techniques. You can check out the repo here. It's a super rudimentary sort of application, but makes me feel like I could someday contribute to awesome software like Blender :)

less professional about me

I want to do things that help people and if it intersects with playing with computers, that's a tremendous bonus. Generally I'd call myself someone who does a lot of dumb fun stuff for the bit. Ultimately this means that, if you work with me, I have lots of dummy commit messages, but I also get obsessed with whatever we're working on. Otherwise, I try to keep the mood up.

less professional interests

• funny pictures of animals
• casting spells that transforms me into various strange objects
• goblins
• carrots

contacting me

You can reach me at ash at tuna dot science, or however you came about my website.