About Me

I am a 35-year old Platform Engineer for Rumble Entertainment, and I’m excited to finally be making a living contributing to my favorite hobby: gaming!

At age five, when most kids wanted to be firefighters or astronauts, I had other aspirations. I distinctly remember a brief exchange with my father one evening while shopping at Lunardi's Supermarket. My father started the conversation:

What do you want to do when you grow up? my dad asked.
I want to make Mario games! And I'll make better ones than [what we have on the NES]! I replied.
Well with that attitude, I'm sure you'll make the best Mario game there is!

Of course, back then I didn't really have an understanding of everything that went into developing software. Even so, as a young kid, I liked to think about how video games worked, and the challenges of writing code - once I knew what code was - to make them.

Eventually, I shelved the thought of making games professionally in favor of other career goals, including possible professions in education, psychiatry, and law. Each had its own merits, but as I explored each of them, I couldn't shake the feeling that something was missing. Due to my wide variety of interests, I began my studies at the University of Redlands as a Chemistry major, later transitioning to Government, Asian Studies, and finally, to Computer Science in my junior year.

Though I had taken a Java course in high school, it wasn't until my first class in C++ three years later that my passion for programming really set in. Unlike my previous forays into various fields of study, Computer Science regularly presented me with difficult challenges which often required a degree of creativity to solve; I was hooked! I excelled in Computer Science, carrying a departmental GPA of 3.65, and I took every CS course that was offered as long as I could fit it into my schedule.

After graduation, I started working for IDEC Corporation at their Sunnyvale campus, a company I had interned with in Osaka, Japan over a previous summer. I learned some sysadmin basics, developed a love for relational databases, and enjoyed automating tasks to improve the efficiency of the IT department. It was at IDEC that I began my journey into C# and SQL.

After three years at IDEC, I joined Ten 90 Studios, a digital studio with a small but talented team of artists and developers. Ten 90 was a great experience, partly because the work environment felt more like family than coworkers. I familiarized myself with front-end development on marketing demo applications using HTML5, JS, AS3, and Haxe. When the time came to deliver our projects, I anxiously watched televised conferences of clients showing off our work in front of thousands of attendees. I'm proud to say that we didn't have any mishaps!

During my time at Ten 90, we pursued a mobile game contract. I accepted responsibility to set up the backend for the game, as no one else in the company had any prior experience with it. With the C# and SQL Server knowledge I gained at IDEC, I was confident we could move beyond mostly front-end development for simple applications into a full-stack software cycle.

This project evolved into Cisco Geek Factor: an IT-heavy trivia game for both iOS and Android. Though the game is no longer available, you can check out screenshots here.

My professional adventures took me to another small team at HiT Software, a company best known for its flagship product DBMoto, a relational database replication tool. There I acted as the lead developer for customer support, added script editors, and limited HDFS support.

When I'm not buried in code, you can find me traveling the world, mastering the art of cooking, fiddling with Photoshop, studying shogi, or exploring virtual worlds with a game controller in my hands!