As clichéd and hopelessly idealistic as it may sound, I want to change the world for the better. I’m heavily impact-driven, and I want to solve real-world problems that tangibly affect people’s lives. This is one of the things that drew me to computer science in the first place: the bits you flip can literally be used by millions of people. More specifically, I’m interested in distributed systems, storage, and large-scale analytics (aka “big data”).

I also keep a bucket list of things that I want to accomplish. It’s still short, but I take completing and updating it pretty seriously. It’s a way of ensuring that the big picture remains in view, even when you get caught up in the day-to-day.

Professionally

I’m a software engineer at Cloudera working on the HDFS team. Formerly, I was a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley in the AMP Lab, and got my undergraduate degree in computer science at the University of Virginia. Finally, I did my high school education at Thomas Jefferson HSST, so I’ve been educated at public schools through and through. My interests are in distributed systems and datacenters, see my research page for details on my academic projects and papers from when I was at Berkeley.

During undergrad, I interned twice at NavigationArts, an enterprise web development company in McLean, VA, and once at SPAWAR Systems Center in San Diego, CA, working on low-cost, long-range, ship-to-ship wireless communication with commodity 802.11 parts.

Other activities

I still keep myself distracted outside of work. I’ve taken up cycling since arriving in California, but my first love is for rowing, a sport I did for four years in high school with moderate championship success. I haven’t had time to take it up again, but I’m looking forward to rowing on the Bay. These days I’m also teaching myself electric guitar. I still try to read for pleasure (philosophy, sci-fi, fantasy, history), and wish I had the time to make this a regular habit. My final passion is food: I like hosting dinner parties for my friends and exploring new restaurants.