Brown University
Software Engineer and Engineering Manager, Twitch Interative, Inc.
The attitude with which you face seemingly impossible requests and incomprehensible bugs matters. I would turn to my teammates and say, “Well, we’re about to learn something interesting!”
“I spent my childhood in a semi-rural area outside of Nashville, Tennessee not too dissimilar from Hilo where I now reside. I moved with my family to California in the midst of the first Internet boom and was mesmerized by Silicon Valley’s technology and entrepreneurship culture. The Monday after I collected my college degree I started work at Apple, not as an engineer as I’d wanted, but I was close enough to the action to get hands-on with the latest innovations. I brought the technical skills I developed while at Apple to startups both in California and in Hilo, where my wife and I moved in 2010. All of them were exhausting, worthwhile experiences, and none of them got off the ground. Then one day, out of the blue, a designer I’d worked with on one such failed project, reached out to me about his new job at the video streaming site, Justin.tv. He remembered the solid iPhone work I did and wanted a software engineer he could trust to build the mobile apps for the company’s new gaming division, Twitch. This time, the wind of fate blew in the right direction and, leveraging the technical, project management and entrepreneurial skills I’d developed, I was able to participate in the creation of a cultural phenomenon. From my bedroom in Hilo. That’s the opportunity afforded to you if you do good work and don’t let failure deter you.”
