// career_obituary.md

Shnae

Shane Barakat. Broke founder and CTO of Polarity. Waterloo Management Engineering ’28, currently a dropout-in-progress. Canadian, with a freshly self-detonated visa. This is the resume he would write if resumes were honest.

RUNWAY $0.00VISA: DEPORTATION PENDINGDEGREE: ABANDONINGO-1 OR BUST

Status board

all systems nominal, define nominal

Runway

$0.00Confirmed by three separate spreadsheets.

Cash burnedlive

$ -On servers, ramen, and 'thinking time'.

Visa status

Pending deportationTN eligibility deleted. On purpose. By him.

Net legal owed

$12,225The O-1 fee he cannot afford but already promised.

Degree

In progress (downward)Management Engineering, a.k.a. spreadsheet coloring.

Days since mom criedlive

-The 2 AM text of June 17, 2026. She has the screenshot.

The play

a coherent strategy if you squint and have never met him

01
burn the boats
Dropped out so there is no fallback. Genius if it works, deportation if it doesn't. Currently it doesn't.
02
dodge the spreadsheets
Enrolled in a degree about spreadsheets specifically to never touch one. The irony is load-bearing.
03
burn the cash
Zero runway is not a problem, it's a forcing function. Investors describe this as 'concerning.'
04
burn the visa
Nuked TN eligibility for the dream. The dream costs $12,225 and is due now.

The pivot log

git log --oneline --author='regret'

a1c0ffe

feat: pivot to enterprise RL distillation

Because the trace databases were, and I quote, dust.

+1 buzzword

deadb01

revert: nuke Zenith entirely

Rust-based agent trace databases. Beautiful. Useless. Gone.

-4 months

0fferup

chore: refuse Poke Ultra ($199/mo)

Clinging to a grandfathered $3/mo Pro sub like a life raft.

+$196 saved

n0reply

wontfix: respond to Grace Kasten

Z Fellows. Ghosting her so the Afore SAFE can't out me as unqualified.

0 replies

Shipped & sunk

a portfolio, technically

HoloFund

BlockHack winner

PEAK

The high point. It has been all downhill since the trophy.

Polarity

Founder / CTO

BURNING

polarity.so. Zero runway, full conviction. Math optional.

Pocket ATS

Builder

LIVE

2k Waterloo co-op seekers test resumes. The blind leading the blind.

Neo Scholars

Litmus project

DUE SAT

Speedrunning the whole thing Saturday June 20. Procrastination as a methodology.

Zenith

Former everything

DELETED

Rust agent trace DBs. Nuked from orbit. RIP.

Visa status: pending deportation

O-1 or bust, leaning bust

A Canadian engineer walked into a perfectly good TN visa pathway, looked at it, and dropped out of school - the one thing that qualified him for it. The new plan is the O-1 visa for extraordinary ability, which requires (a) extraordinary ability and (b) $12,225 he does not have.

Old planTN visaself-deleted

New planO-1or bust

Legal fee$12,225unaffordable

Funds$0.00see: runway

Backup planNoneboats burned

ConfidenceUnshakeninexplicably

Interrogate the founder

he can't lie to a shell

shnae@polarity: ~/career

shnae shell v0.28 (build: failing)

loading career.json … done

WARN: runway depleted

WARN: visa eligibility not found

type `help` for commands.

try: whoami · runway · visa · zenith · pivot · grace · poke · help

// last words

He burned the boats, the cash, and the visa. All that’s left is the conviction - and that doesn’t clear immigration.

fund the runway →interrogate him