About

I don’t use LinkedIn, so this page is a simple stand-in so you can see who I am and what I spend my time working on.

I’m an electrical engineering student focused on power electronics and embedded systems. Most of what I know comes from building things and then figuring out why they don’t behave the way I expected.

My main paid work has been Legendary Upside Sidekick, a browser-based fantasy football drafting tool used by a few hundred paying users. I built the extension, backend, and infrastructure behind it, and learned a lot from the founders about turning statistical ideas into something you can compute at scale, like simulating thousands of seasons to rank players. It’s mature now and mostly runs on its own.

I first got into systems work building Intel Hackintosh machines, which is where I started learning how hardware and software interact at a low level.

A lot of my time goes into my homelab, where I run a mix of storage, compute, and GPU workloads. It started as a simple storage system and gradually grew as I added more services and complexity. These days the storage side is fairly straightforward, and most of the interesting work happens on high-memory machines I use as scratch space for running code and inference workloads. I’ve spent a lot of time chasing issues that only show up under load across networking, storage, and hardware and software boundaries. That process has taught me to stick with problems until I understand what is actually happening.

I also spend a lot of time working with microcontrollers, mostly STM32 and ESP. I like building small systems that interact with the physical world by reading sensors, controlling things, and tying that into larger systems. A lot of that work ends up being about integration, getting firmware, hardware, and infrastructure to work together reliably.

On the hardware side, I’ve done a fair amount of board-level work, including reworking QFN packages, tracking down faults, and fixing issues in power delivery sections and embedded boards. I enjoy that kind of debugging because it forces you to understand what the system is actually doing instead of what it is supposed to be doing.

One of my bigger recent projects is ezgb, where I reverse engineered the firmware for the EZ Flash Jr, a Game Boy flash cartridge whose menu software only ships as a compiled binary and hasn’t had a meaningful update from its maker in years. I disassembled the kernel and worked out how the cart’s hardware works, which let me compile my own code into the firmware and run it on real hardware. I’ve used that to add a long list of features and fixes, like stopping the cart from writing garbage save files once its backup battery dies, and anyone can apply the mod from a browser-based patcher. Based on downloads per release, I’d estimate at least 20 people are running it.

I also design and 3D print parts when I need them, usually to support other projects such as mounting components, building enclosures, or solving mechanical constraints.

I also created an online multiplayer version of my favorite board game Valeria Card Kingdoms. Try it out at vcko.lukesau.com. Lately I’ve been applying what I learned at Sidekick to try to solve the game with compute, by simulating huge numbers of games to find the strongest moves.

Most of what I work on is driven by curiosity. If something seems interesting or confusing, I usually end up building something around it just to understand it better.

You can find my GitHub here: github.com/lukesau. Most of my current work is in private repositories, but I would be happy to walk through specific projects in more detail in an interview.