About

I am a software developer who, like many in my generation, was exposed to programming through Flash as a teenager. The first lines of code I ever wrote powered the pause and play buttons for my animations; soon after, I realized I was more interested in creating interactions for my animations than I was in animating anything. Over the next few years, I steadily taught myself how to code in order to create games and visual toys with Flash and Processing.

In 2010 I left my hometown of Philadelpia to attend McGill University, which was a wonderful excuse to live in Montreal for five years. Living in Montreal shaped me into the person I am today, and I will forever love the city for it. While I started university with the intention of leaving as a software developer (which is what ultimately happened), I fell in love with math in my third year of school and switched into a Math/Computer Science joint major in my fourth. This meant spending an extra year at McGill, and I was more than happy to oblige. While I don’t do much math these days, the general clarity of thought and beauty of argumentation present in the subject had a big influence on my approach to problem solving.

In 2015 I graduated from McGill and entered the “real” world as a software engineer at Google in New York City, working on the search frontend. As I settled into work life, I began rock climbing and fell in love with the sport. After working at Google for a few years, I left to convert a cargo van into a mobile home and travel North America. In that time, I devoted myself to developing my climbing skills, and climbed in places like Yosemite and Joshua Tree National Parks in California, El Potrero Chico in Nuevo León, Mexico, and Squamish in British Columbia, Canada.

After a year and a half on the road, I started to miss programming and the feeling of building something. In early 2020, I wrapped up the nomadic chapter of my life and returned to software development, re-energized and excited to create again.