Hi there, I’m Dave, a software person in the Bay Area. I grew up in New Jersey, went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, then went to Penn State for grad school. I moved to California in 2014 after living in Blacksburg, Virginia for five years.
I’m a long-time programmer - I began programming when I was 8 writing text adventures in GWBASIC on my school’s computer. In junior high I wrote text adventure games in QBASIC. In high school I wrote some RPG frameworks in Visual Basic. In college I wrote MUSHcode for PennMUSH including the guts of an extremely involved space system. In grad school I wrote a chess engine. The day job tends to be some combination of JavaScript, Python, and Java - all objectively better technologies, all far less fun.
In my spare time I read, exercise, and backpack. Over the last year I’ve been learning more abstract algebra and number theory, and hacking on a new chess engine.