I used to have many stuffed animals when I was little, including a cool teddy bear with swivel-able arms and legs. Anyway, what happened was that one day I was playing with my bear, pretending to cook him in the oven. (Don’t ask.) I forgot him in there, my mother started cooking dinner, and a horrible smell soon permeated the house. Needless to say, she had really cooked my bear! The food was ruined, and of course so was the bear. I cried and cried… But I look back now and laugh at the whole thing. She cooked my bear! He didn’t have a name, but after his incident, he would perhaps be known, in teddy bear heaven, as Burnard.

I graduated from UCLA in 2002 with a B.S. in Computer Science.

I type about 100 wpm using the Dvorak keyboard layout.

I worked at Google for three years, from 2008 ’til 2011. Google was actually the first big company I worked at. I decided I didn’t like the big-company environment, preferring to be more self-directed. I like the feeling of being fully responsible for a project, from its design to its implementation, and having it represent more of me when it’s done. Google was a great learning experience, but I found it hard to find a place in the company where I could “unfold” inside the company.

I have a great deal of technical experience developing database applications for small businesses, using MySQL as a backend and Microsoft Access as a frontend. Say what you will about it, but Access is a great tool for quickly developing Windows-style interfaces. I enjoy understanding a company’s business model, constructing a data model to match, and crafting the UI which employees will use to interact with it. Using Access backed by MySQL has a number of caveats when applications are to be somewhat scalable, but it’s a good toolset.

My favorite authors are Haruki Murakami, Tom Robbins and the science fiction writer Greg Egan. Each is mind-expanding in a different sort of way.