my first media appearance

For the sake of posterity, I feel compelled to liberate this picture from the confines of LinkedIn and document what I haven't forgotten already. I'm not at all certain that my name hadn't been printed in The Olympian before (perhaps for high school sports), but I do recall this being the first picture of me in the local paper. It finds me the summer after graduation in '99, at the internship that had come along with a scholarship that I (and about 3-5 others) had won my senior year.

I had started coding on my TI-83 calculator in pre-calculus class, and taken a C programming course at the local community college (via the Running Start program), but I don't remember that being much of a factor in the Intel internship competition. Maybe it was. Either way, I continued on to four summer internships at that Dupont, WA intel site and managed to move from an IT group that first year into a server testing lab team (I remember optimizing a testing program so that it flashed onto the firmware an order-of-magnitude faster) and then even high-end server PCB stack reference design in my fourth year. Many thanks to Intel for my start in the computing industry, and for inoculating me with a benign mega-corp experience.

This picture was sent to me by Rick, whom I amazingly ended up working with at Tableau 20 years later. Truly a small world moment, though neither of us realized it for over a year! Thank you to Rick's mother who had saved that clipping.