Joseph Eftekhari, Hanu Prateek Kunduru and Salim Salaues: Jeff-Tech
Jeff-Tech is heads-down integrating Zenko with the hot new file system, IPFS. By building a Zenko stack into IPFS, they will enable yet another venue for Zenko’s multi-cloud power—leveraging the peer-to-peer distributed file system across connected computers. Because IPFS enables distribution of parts of files across huge numbers of “peers” it enhances data durability—even making it immutable, according to the team. The Jeff-Tech team doesn’t have any members named Jeff…long story, but as you might guess, it has something to do team member Joseph Eftekhari’s name, and his being absent when the team chose the name. In addition to Joseph, the team’s two other members, Salim Salaues and Hanu Prateek Kunduru are all students at 42, living in the dorms.
Joseph is from Fresno, California, where he attended Fresno State and earned a B.S. in Communicative Disorders and Deaf Studies. After graduating, he worked in his field for a year, helping children with autism. He got the tech bug, though, so decided he wanted to join a tech company. He saw 42 as the perfect way to get there, and has been here for 10 months now. This is his third hackathon, if you count game jams as hackathons (and we do J).
Salim is from Los Angeles. He studied graphic design, but he pivoted to tech as he moved into the working world. He’s been an engineer for a drone startup, in addition to having held multiple sysadmin and network admin jobs. He joined 42 ten months ago to learn to program, and couldn’t be happier. In addition to studying here, he volunteers in the Bocal doing, guess what, systems and network administration. This is his second hackathon; his first, just two weeks ago, was a weekend-long web app development hackathon. That one, he said, gave him the confidence to do this one.
Hanu is originally from India, but has been here in the U.S. for one year. He holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and MBA with dual focus in Marketing and Finance. He ran a startup in India, and came to 42 after a successful exit…this is his post-exit break. He thought it would be a great way to formalize his skill set. Initially, he thought his time here would have been shorter, but he loves it, so he’s been here about a year, as one of the first student at 42 US. He also volunteers at 42, doing pedagogy and devops. Definitely becoming a serial hacker, he’s done five hackathons since his first in February—and he won the first three. All that, and he wrote a book: ES6 for Humans.
