Background
A current resident of Pittsburgh, PA, I grew up in San Diego, California. I attended High Tech High school - a charter school focused on training the next generation of technical leaders.
I began writing code around age 8, when I took my first programming class (along with fencing and chess) at a summer camp. I dual-booted my first linux system when I was 14, and shortly afterwards learned how to touch type using the programmer dvorak keyboard layout (I still cannot touch type qwerty). I got my first internship at Packet Video, a tech company in San Diego, when I was 16, and I worked to migrate our existing DevOps infrastructure to use Puppet for configuration management.
Education
In college at the University of California, Irvine, I earned dual degrees in Biology and Electrical Engineering, and graduated magna cum laude. I went on to earn a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineeriing and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and my dissertation focused on optical voltage sensing in the micro- and kilo-volt range.
Work ( Resume, Linkedin )
In graduate school, I worked on various pieces of software - I published a well-known python package used for certain types of electromagnetics simulations, which uses numpy under the hood to efficiently calculate electromagnetic properties of periodic structures. I also published several other packages, including liapy, sugarplot, sciparse, ankilol, and scrippy as well as the hardware and software for various development boards I designed, like this ADC dev board and this thermoelectric cooler controller.
After graduate school, I co-founded a software company focused on building a marketplace for electric vehicle repair. My co-founder and I raised $1.2M, I designed, built, and tested our MVP, and hired and managed our first software engineer.
I am currently a software engineer at Reality Labs Research in Pittsburgh, PA, where I work on our infrastructure team helping to build the DevOps tools to support our research efforts on Codec Avatars.
Passion projects
YouTube
I maintain an educational YouTube channel, where I teach the basics of physics, electrical engineering, and other technical topics. What started off as a way to teach myself various topics has grown into a substantial library and modest source of income.
Medium
I also write on Medium, everything from health and wellness to education and learning to software engineering. I also write about and advocate for autistic and disabled people - I myself am autistic.
Software
Most of the software I have written in graduate school and my free time is open-source, which you can find on my GitHub. I am an advocate for open-source software, and have tremendous respect for companies that choose to open-source internal tools or build business around such software. A current project is ankilol, which I use to create flashcards to help me study various topics I like to learn about.
Hobbies and Personal Life
I am an avid backpacker - having hiked through Yosemite up half dome and back, as well as a smattering of shorter trips. I also enjoy rock climbing, both indoors and outdoors. You'll often find me after work playing board games with frineds - especially cooperative ones - with Spirit Island being my current favorite.
I am currently engaged to my incredible partner Nikole. I moved out to Pittsburgh to support her while she completes her Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon.