This is assignment zero, a brief biography, written for Dr. Budd’s CS419 and CS480. Enjoy!
Part of my decision for coming to Oregon State was that my Debian install had automatically chosen ftp.oregonstate.edu as the fastest mirror available. The message this sent me as a high school student was that OSU, our at least a few people on campus, cared about Free Open Source Software. It didn’t hurt that OSU had an engineering program that is well known for creating quality graduates either.
During the fall term of my freshman year I meet up with the ftp.oregonstate.edu admin, Scott Kveton. At the time he was forming the Open Source Lab and was looking to hire students to write open source software. I had been using Linux for a couple of years and could hardly contain my excitement; I was going to be paid to write open source software as a freshman! And at the time I had no idea that this job was going to open up crazy amazing opportunities for me and all of the other students at the Open Source Lab.
Every successful project I have ever worked on has had a few components: an interesting problem, an experienced mentor and hands off management. At the Open Source Lab I had all of these components for three years and I grew a lot as a developer and person. The OSL and FOSS are great opportunities for students to work on interesting and large projects even as they are still developing their skills in the classroom.
The software I find the most interesting is behind the scenes: the system software. Kernels, device drivers and networking protocols are all things that most users don’t have to think about but are nonetheless very important. There are a few interesting properties about this level of software. First, it must be extremely well thought out and written; if this software goes bad then the user is going to have a very bad day. Second, the code is usually rich with interesting data structures and programming tricks to squeeze out as much performance from the hardware as possible. And finally a lot of smart and interesting people work in system software and I like working with those types of people.
I decided I wanted to be a computer scientist after working for two high school robotics project. The patience and guidance of my mentor, Ron Jackson, helped improve my programming abilities a great deal. Despite the tight deadlines involved in creating full scale humanoid robots in under 6 months during both years the software was written and working before the competition. It was a huge confidence boost to have that responsibility and trust invested in me and in the end come through with a working solution. I had found something I was good at and had a really fun time doing. Perfect.
After college I would like to work as a Linux Kernel developer. This decision is partly influenced by the great experience I had working on a genetic algorithm for the CPU scheduler while working at IBM in Austin. It is also a result of the number of great interactions I have had with members of Kernel community including: Val Henson, Greg KH, Jake Moilanen, the entire OzLabs crew and many others that I have probably forgotten. Plus, I like penguins- that helps.
/me runs off to Australia for a bit.
