About Me
Thursday, December 30th, 2004I am a Software Engineer in Los Angeles, California. I was born on August 4, 1978, in Moscow, Russia, and moved to the U.S. with my family in 1990.
I’m married–my wife Linda is finishing her dissertation in the English department at UCLA. We’ve got two cats (Ansel and Teagan) who both need to lose quite a bit of weight.
I went to Santa Monica High School and then attended UCLA majoring in Computer Science. During high school and college I interned (and contracted) for Microsoft, working on Visual FoxPro and Windows 98. In 1998, however, I left UCLA to be the first employee at Scour–one of the first multimedia search engines founded by my friends from UCLA. After three years of ups and downs, we got sued out of existence by the MPAA and the RIAA. I then worked for Red Swoosh, and then a (now-defunct) consulting firm Skematix. I spent a few years leading technology at Kareo, building pretty cutting-edge software for the medical billing market. I also dabbled again at getting an actual degree from UCLA (this time in Economics, though). As of October 2007 I work at Hulu.com where I try to figure out how on earth to not get any more excited about working with a bunch of really bright folks doing very cool things with online video.
My technology interests include web services, application platform development, and mobile devices. My platform of choice is .NET (C#), though I was a big fan of PHP, and have developed software in C/C++, Visual Basic and a variety of other languages. These days I mostly work with MS SQL Server though at other times I’ve dealt with MySQL and Oracle, both of which I liked. I have a soft spot for PowerShell and am a long-time user of Linux.
My outside interests on the internet revolve around collaborative software and services. I’ve been somewhat addicted to Wikipedia, and more recently to Wikinews. I’ve written some minor open-source software, and run a few minor web sites.
If I think of something to say else about me, I’ll probably update this text.