Hello! My name is Atul Varma. I generally go by the name toolness on the internet, whether it's the domain name of my blog, or my username on twitter and github.
I'm currently doing design and engineering work with the Mozilla Foundation's Webmaker Community Team, and am looking for volunteer mentor opportunities.
During my time at Kenyon College, I served as a Mathematics and Computer Science tutor.
After graduating in 2001 with a B.S. in Mathematics, I moved to Chicago and became a certified adult literacy tutor at The Blue Gargoyle; I also tutored mathematics and basic digital literacy to adults and teens.
In 2003, I attended the University of Chicago's Masters Program in Computer Science, where I informally mentored a number of colleagues.
In 2005, I co-founded a startup called Humanized with some of my colleagues from university. While technically a for-profit, it was mission-driven: specifically, we wanted to create software that made computers both less frustrating and easier to use for beginners and experts alike. This was embodied in our flagship product, Enso.
In 2008, I joined Mozilla as an early member of their Labs team. There, I was technical lead for the Ubiquity project, an Enso-inspired browser add-on. In 2009, I was the technical lead for the Jetpack project, which went on to become the Add-on SDK, a platform and toolkit allowing developers to easily create Firefox add-ons.
While everything I had been working on up to this point had somehow involved empowering users and developers, it wasn't until 2010 that my focus specifically changed to education. During this time, I started the Hackasaurus project with Jess Klein. Aside from developing the Web X-Ray Goggles, I also led a few hack jams.
In 2011, I continued to work on Hackasaurus and also started prototyping a tool called Collusion to illuminate how third-party tracking works on the Web. This eventually received a Ford Foundation grant and evolved into Lightbeam for Firefox.
Over the past two years, I've continued to work on a variety of products and prototypes, including lovebomb.me, Open Badges and Thimble.
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My high school, undergraduate, and graduate portfolios are still online.
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I've always been a fan of Interactive Fiction. In 2008, I wrote a Web-based interactive fiction interpreter called Parchment, which I'm still quite fond of.
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I sometimes make silly things, like this Boromir Death Simulator and this Nike Sweatshops Ad.
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completely obsessed with Chicago history.