I grew up in Gainesville, Florida. My family moved there when I was two months old (I was born in Salt Lake City, Utah). In high school I spent most of my free time dividing between math contests, playing guitar, and other extracurricular commitments (i.e. Super Smash Bros., Pokemon, Team Fortress 2, Minecraft, etc.). I played in a progressive metal band called Aardfish that you can check out here if you're so inclined. It's some fun stuff.
Senior year of high school I decided I wanted to go far away. I wanted to study physics, math, or computer science so I applied to EECS at Berkeley because the college of engineering was easier to switch out of than into. I came here and ended up loving 61A! So I stayed in EECS and I'm really happy where I am now.
In middle school once I made an RPG where you had to fight cockroaches on my TI-83. Then I didn't touch any real programming languages for another four years when I took the AP CS class sophomore year and learned Java. I learned a bunch of other languages when I came to Cal.
I program a lot now. I've been to a few hackathons where I've built a couple of nifty Python projects (plus I've made this whole big IRC thing from scratch). Other than that I'm pretty alright at programming in C, Haskell and Scheme.
I still like to play music. I've recorded some more stuff since I came to Cal here
There's some prog rock, pop, post-rock and probably other stuff too.
I am still involved with the aforementioned "other extracurricular activities"
I go to a lot of concerts. Like two a week when I'm in Florida. Maybe two a month in California. Last week my friend's band Velocirapture opened for my favorite band CHON and a couple of guys from CHON came to our after-party. That was awesome.
And of course I write a lot of code and I like to read books about computer science and math and physics and stuff like that.
Last summer I took a 28 hour bus ride to Indianapolis to compete in the Pokemon National Championships. I did so poorly that I dropped out of the tournament after the 4th of 9 rounds of Swiss pairings.
In high school I produced a collection of lo-fi karaoke Valentine's Day hits called "MMM, Baby: A Sensual Collection of Love Songs for the Whole Family".
We sold on something like 30 copies for several different prices (whatever people were willing to pay) and the proceeds went to buying wood to build a ball pit in my garage. You can now listen for free here. We also made a Christmas CD that's even worse. "A Very Harry Christmas". It's not on the internet. Ask me about it.
During dead week last fall I spent the whole time playing the iOS game Dots and I got up to 6th place on the global leaderboard. I'm not on there any more.
I'm in charge of the IRC project which has already been and will probably continue to be an enormous time commitment. Other than 61A stuff I'm taking Physics 7B and lab assisting for CS 70 (another EECS class that I loved). If I have the time after those things I'll try to write some music or read some books.
This is probably pretty typical but I like to guide students in such a way that they can find a solution almost entirely on their own with the right leading questions. Most of my previous teaching experience has been one-on-one or in small groups, so I'm more accustomed to that kind of slow and deliberate style of helping students.
This is my first time TAing so I expect my teaching style to evolve throughout the summer.