About

In 1996 I was at the old United Artists Theater in Colma (now a Best Buy) watching one of the greatest films of all time: Independence Day. Will Smith, Bill Pullman as the greatest fictional American President — great cast — but my favorite was Jeff Goldblum. His David Levinson, senior satellite tech, cracks the alien comms, blows their op-sec, and gets nukes onto the mothership.

I walked away from that theater with this meta-story:

One determined individual with a laptop and superior knowledge can save the world.

That personal myth, though silly, is still what I believe.

I'm Thomas Paras, and I'm a technologist...

...though I don't have a traditional tech background. I attended City College of San Francisco and studied hardware repair, networking principles, ethical hacking, and software development, but the need to work kept me from finishing a CS degree.

My full resume shows a patchwork of odd jobs — paying the bills while building side projects to keep one foot in tech.

With the help of my professional network, I landed a Product Support Specialist role at TripIt where I spent a decade stewarding the data templates that powered our app.

At TripIt, I was an early adopter of AI tooling. With the help of Claude Code, I built myself tools that increased my output by 4x, then shared them with my team. That experience led me to pursue AI development as my focus.

I'm now looking for a new opportunity to harness and extend LLMs to build products that enrich our lives.

I'm also a community artist

For nearly two decades, I've volunteered at Bindlestiff Studio — the epicenter for Filipino American performing arts and artists — working across roles as actor, playwright, director, and producer.

During my most active years, I produced The Geek Show 2: Bindlecon — a multi-genre anthology show, well reviewed by the San Francisco Chronicle. After the run, my troupe and I were still hungry for more, so I assembled a small team to participate in Pianofight Theater's Shortlived VII, an audience-judged short theater competition. Our submission — "No Country for Old Henchmen" — won the festival and the $5000 cash prize.

Months later, after stepping in to help produce Stories High 18 (a long-running annual page-to-stage workshop), another group pulled out of an October show — prime calendar real-estate for theater — and Stories High had injected fresh energy into the space.

So I assembled an energetic and ambitious (crazy?) team of artists, and with six weeks of prep, no script, and no plan, we built a 2-hour cyberpunk theater experience called Forbidden Future(s) from scratch. It pushed what we thought possible — effects, storytelling, logistics — in a black box theater. People who worked on or saw the show regard it as one of the high points in our theater's history.

I'm fortunate to have found — at 17 — a creative community from a similar culture and background. Decades of that creative energy — dozens of productions — shaped me in ways I'm still discovering. My artistic achievements were only possible because I stand on the shoulders of giants.

Telling original stories with immensely talented friends on a stage in San Francisco has been one of the great honors of my life.