My name is Tim Mastny and I’m a software engineer at Wave, building life-changing financial infrastructure for developing countries in Africa. I’m based out of Omaha, Nebraska.
I have a wife Michaela and a son Desmond. My wife owns a small business and a non-profit. She’s a competitive powerlifter, and I help coach and support her as much as I can. Desmond is a toddler. He teaches me how to play and I try to teach him not to throw things.
Hobbies and interests:
I also dabble in chess, go, piano, and I read a lot of non-fiction too.
Please reach out! I’m happy to chat over email or coffee.
The first videogame I ever saw was Super Mario 64 when I was 6 years old and it absolutely blew my mind. As a child my favorite games were Ratchet and Clank, Jak and Daxter, and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. My middle school years overlapped with the golden age of MMOs, so I spent thousands of hours in Runescape and World of Warcraft.
During high school, my interests drifted from videogames and technology as I focused on competitive speech and debate, qualifying for the national tournament my senior year. The lessons I learned about public speaking, attention to detail, adversarial thinking and scholarly research really grew me as a person. But there were also skills that served me well in debate I had to unlearn in the professional world: being argumentative, overly critical, and monologuing.
I graduated with a degree in Mathematics with a concentration in Electrical Engineering, but my majors changed from Criminology, Anthropology, and Geology along the way.
During college, I had a keen interest in aerospace, interning as NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory for 3 summers. I was fortunate enough to be there during both the discovery of the Higgs Boson and the landing of the Curiosity Rover on Mars. I personally worked on automating electromagnetic compatibility testing systems for the GOES-R weather satellite and the Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) project.
My first job out of college was at Boeing, where I developed an interest in data engineering and analytics. After working there for a short period of time, I returned to Nebraska to study statistics full-time at the University of Nebraska-Omaha. There I discovered R, open source software and science, and Bayesian statistics.
These became my primary areas of interest for the next few years. I contributed to many open source R projects and developed a few of my own. I also honed my analytics skills with a focus on Bayesian analysis. Most of these efforts are documented on my projects page or in my blog posts.
Next I worked at Hudl, a company specializing in sports analytics software and technology, working on their internal data science team. The work I’m most proud of there is Hudl’s Greatest Comebacks, which was a analytics tool to search for exciting moments in football games.
Then I pivoted to fintech working for Bread. Working in that space lead me to Wave. Before Wave, I honestly took banking and finance for granted. But it’s actually a life-changing product and I’m excited to bring useful, affordable financial infrastructure to Africa.
These days my technical focus at work is on data engineering and infrastructure.