I was born and bred on St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. Yes, I grew up in a visitor's paradise. It was a pretty idyllic childhood, but nothing is perfect. The price of paradise includes isolation, limited resources, and hurricanes. Hurricanes Hugo and Marilyn both hit the Virgin Islands while I lived there, causing extensive damage, and the storms and their aftermaths were unforgettable experiences.
I was undeniably a nerd. I loved reading and writing and math and computers. My junior high and high school activities included MathCounts, the National Geography Bee, and quiz bowl. I devoted myself to lengthy research and writing projects for fun, and I racked up large phone bills after discovering usenet.
My most formative high school experience was away from home. I spent two summers at Hampshire College Summer Studies in Mathematics, an excellent summer program for exceptional math students, where I was introduced to yellow pigs (hence this site's name). I highly recommend the program for serious high school math students.
Despite having some exceptional teachers and classes, I was bored in high school, so when I heard about Simon's Rock, a college designed for younger scholars, I applied. I received a full scholarship, left high school after two years (yes, I'm a high school dropout), and entered college at 16. Simon's Rock is a truly unique place, and I had a wonderful time there. I took excellent classes, wrote lots of papers, and was genuinely challenged. I found a place where I felt like I fit in and made lots of friends who were interested in learning.
I started tinkering around with computers. I'd been a Mac person for a long time, but I started using Unix. My sophmore year I installed Debian GNU/Linux, and was hooked on Linux and the potential of Open Source/Free Software. I got a summer job networking the campus (fiber and ethernet; I can probably still draw the campus' fiber diagram if you are interested). For much of my last two years in college, I worked nearly fulltime in the computer department. Somehow I also managed to carry a heavy course load and spend time with my excellent friends and housemates. My senior year I had a six month internship in university IT departments at Stanford University. It was during that time that I wrote my undergraduate thesis, a mathematical story inspired by Alice in Wonderland and Godel, Escher, Bach.
Still a teenager, I graduated and took on the job as the (sole) Systems Administrator at Simon's Rock, which turned out to be an excellent decision because it gave me the freedom to do everything from tech support and wiring and building computers to web design, DBA, and router configuration to making policy decisions and supervising student workers, all along with more traditional sysadmin tasks. I even got to teach a Linux course.
I wasn't sure grad school in math was for me, so I decided to go to a masters program in philosophy at Tufts University. I moved to Boston (Somerville), where I lived with three former classmates, took classes, continued to work at Simon's Rock (part-time during the school year and full-time during the summer), and spent a lot of time in Cape Cod, where my partner had moved.
Once I had (mostly) finished classes, I moved to Cape Cod (Falmouth), where I continued working full-time and studied for my comprehensive exams. In my free time, I enjoyed going to the beach (even though it was so much colder than in St. Thomas!), read a lot, and taught myself more programming. After I'd been living there for about a year, I got a job at WHOI implementing a network registration system. In my free time, I juggled, gardened, edited Wikipedia, and visited friends in the New England area.
After three years in Cape Cod (that's a total of nine winters in Massachusetts, but who's counting?), my partner and I moved to sunny California to be Site Reliability Engineers at Google. The work itself and the general work environment were challenging and stimulating. I met amazing people. Outside of work, I loved the warmer weather, swimming pools, year-round farmers' markets, and ample bookstores and universities.
I continued to maintain academic pretensions in a variety of fields. I presented a paper on Virgin Islanders at a conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. I went to Yellow Pig Math Days at Hampshire College. I attended history and philosophy of science talks at Stanford, and sat in on philosophy, history of science, and linguistics courses there.
After about six years at Google, my happiness was dwindling. I was tired, and while it continued to be an excellent place to work in many ways, it was lonely being one of the few women, and the company was veering in directions that made me less proud to be there. I left primarily in protest of real names requirements.
I had just taken a linguistics course at Stanford that I found fascinating, so I took a month off work to attend the Linguistic Institute in Boulder, and decided I was ready to go back to school. I left Google one week, and the next week I started at San Jose State, where I received a certificate in computational linguistics. This coincided with when MOOCs were just starting to take off, so I also took a pile of CS classes online. I also contracted for The Wikimedia Foundation, promoted diversity in tech, and did a bit of traveling.
Refreshed after a year, I returned to Google, where I was able to be a part of many of the changes I wanted. I became a more active advocate/instigator for diversity and inclusion in tech, served as an advisor to The Ada Initiative, and started some successful programs/resources. For the first year, I continued taking linguistics classes, including attending the Linguistic Institute at the University of Michigan. Once I finished classes, I started up a new SRE team as a tech lead and then became an engineering manager. I also became involved in many side projects, such as providing input to Google's AI Principles. (Resumé.)
Then while traveling on a work trip, I found myself suddenly and mysteriously in a lot of foot pain. Some number of months and doctors later, I was diagnosed with a relatively rare nerve condition (CRPS), which causes constant pain and limits my mobility. This resulted in spending a lot of time/effort managing pain and minimizing walking. On the plus side, I started swimming (nearly) daily as part of my physical therapy routine, and became a pretty serious swimmer, swimming in long-distance open ocean events, such as the St John Power Swim and St Croix Coral Reef swim.
(Last updated 2024)