CompSci 108 : Spring 2009

Interests

I'm very interested in energy and technology. I'm a big believer in the Web, and think that all software should be done through the Web.

Programming Experience

To see a complete list of the projects I've worked on, please see my home page.

In short, I

• Am from Silicon Valley
• Started taking programming classes at my local community college in 8th grade
• Interned at tech companies in development and QA roles starting my sophomore year of high school
• Worked on several start ups for myself as well as others, which have seen various degrees of success

Autobiography

• When did you first start using a computer?

Don't remember the age. I was very small...

• What kinds of computers have you used?

All sorts; laptops, desktop, phones, PDAs, smartphones, too many embedded devices to list :)

• How do you use computers on a daily basis?
I mostly surf the Web and check email. I read lots of blogs, and research anything that interests me
• What event(s) made you interested in studying computer science?

When I first signed up, I thought that computer science was all about computer programming and learning to use a computer more efficiently. I turned out to be completely wrong, but still enjoy the thought process associated with computer science

• What do you think a computer scientist does on a daily basis?

Research; I have no desire to become a computer scientist

• Describe your best (or worst) programming experience; what made it so good (or so bad)?
I really enjoyed the programming I did for my own start-up. I taught myself everything in regards to the software I was using (LAMP stack running in Amazon EC2 using S3). It was great, because there was so much I could tweak. I had so many options and flexibility. Most importantly though, I had built a real product that I could pitch to customers.
• Describe your most (or least) favorite programming project; what made it so appealing (or so unappealing)?

I had to work on a large CGI-driven internal Web service for a company once. It wasn't very enjoyable. There was no adherence to MVC, and thus javascript, PERL, and SQL where all clumped together in HTML files. The fact that the project had been in existance for several years and was being maintained by a single engineer were the main problems. I had to read (and understand) all of his code (difficult, given that PERL is a write-only language) and implement the feature set in our backlog. The fact that we were using Agile with SCRUM made it a lot more manageable.

• How do you see yourself using computers in the future?

Hopefully, I'll have a computer implanted in my brain in the future.