Summary: Family, Aviation, Vehicular Hobbies, Computing, Amateur Radio, 3D FDM + Work.

Family

I’m a father of two and a husband - our family is my world.

Avocations

Aviation, be it part 91 general aviation ASEL+G or radio controlled model aircraft; from gliders to helicopters to planes and FPV quads. At this stage of my disease, I’m rocking a 1947 Cessna 140 “Miniwagon” taildragger setup for lite backcountry camping.

Vehicular hobbies such as HPD track days in my (former) WRX “Hawkeyes” 291hp wagon, daily driving Club Miata with top down (unless it rains!) and owning, and modding multiple bikes: Suzuki DRZ400 “Slug”, KTM 990SD “Super Duke”, KTM 390 “Baby Duke” and Honda Grom “Stunt”.

Computing from childhood into present, from 8-Bit Atari 800 line, to PCs, to Linux and embedded systems. Assembly programming TRSs in Dos, started with Linux on kernel 0.97, did AP Comp-Sci freshmen year in high school, to CompE degree from UIUC with internship at Microsoft Xbox Live. Compiled or interpreted, strict vs not, imperative vs functional, B to GiB, Khz to Ghz - I’ve dun it!

Amateur Radio is my newest hobby. For now I’m a FCC licensed ‘Technician’ and enjoy QRP mobile operations. Initially APRS on 2m attracted me, but now I focus on HF and got into CW (morse code) and JS8.

3D printing and design complements my other hobbies and I’m a big fan of FDM for prototyping projects. Parametric design in FreeCAD is very satisfying while watching a large delta printer do its thing is mesmarizing.

Professionally

I work as a Systems Engineer and SRE for a transportation company on projects involving the intersection of data mining, human machine interfaces and automation.

Previously, I was a research engineer at University of Illinois, then University of Chicago, working on 100G+ high BDP networking, private clusters, data mining and genome sequencing.

Moved to Bay Area to do SRE work on Google Search, Google internal CMS, Gmail, Calendar and other projects.