I arrived in California from Pennsylvania after finishing high school. At De Anza College in Silicon Valley, I started learning how to build web sites during an internship at NASA Ames Research Center. As part of the Quest team, we used streaming video to bring K-12 classrooms in touch with astronauts and engineers. I transferred from De Anza to U.C. Santa Cruz where I received my Bachelors degree in Computer Science. As the web evolved, so did my knowledge of technologies I used to engineer many of the internal and external web applications still used by students, faculty and staff today. From UCSC, I attended graduate school in the department of Computer Science at U.C. Santa Barbara, where I learned the tenants of distributed systems, network theory and Internet service clusters. I completed my Masters Thesis on a method to dynamically provision resources within large Internet service clusters and deepened my understanding of how online services are designed to scale. Since then, I've hopped around to various jobs within the government defense, intelligence and Internet search engine industries. At each change in position, I've gradually inched closer to my dream job of working at Google. Now I'm a member of the Knol team, building tools and a site that encourages collaboration and knowledge sharing between anyone willing to share their information and the world who seeks it. |