So, who am I?

I must admit, that’s a good question. Primarily, I am a human being, exploring my way through life, taking advantage of all the opportunities that come my way.

I like to think every thing happens for a reason. A whole lot happens in life. Both good and bad. I learn something for every experience. Life is good.

Another notable fact about my existence as a human being is that I am incredibly observant, so I’m told. I observe everything in life. I pay attention to very specific details and can come up with a lot of ideas because of this unique ability of mine.

Similarly, my memory is organized in the most incredible way. Virtually every experience I have in life is saved in my brain for eternity. I would describe my memory as situational and sensory oriented. For example, I might have a memory of a time when I was having a snack and my feet were very cold. Then, sometime in the future, I may have another experience or glimpse of knowledge associated with cool feet which would suddenly bring said memory to the forefront of my brain.

That’s a little broad, don’t you think…?

On a more specific note, I am a 15 year old high school student living in Palo Alto. I go to Palo Alto High School, affectionately known as Paly. I am a sophomore. I’m a member of the school’s web journalism program—The Paly Voice. We are the recipients of multiple awards, including a handful of Pacemaker awards and a Webby! Our journalism program has been voted one of the best in the country. Additionally, our advisor, Paul Kandell has been named the 2009 Dow Jones Journalism Teacher of the year. As the assistant webmaster (soon to be head webmaster once Evan Hahn goes to college), I am busy working on the next version of our site which is going to be powered by Drupal. I am also working with Creative Commons on a the Student Journalism 2.0 project which incorporates their licenses into the journalism teaching process. I’m also the social media editor for the Voice.

Aside from school, I would consider myself an avid internet user. I love to tweet about everything which I find interesting. Namely startups, technology and my dog. I’m an early adopter of many awesome products and services. I worship and couldn’t live without my iPhone.

More than anything, I love making things and seeing people use and appreciate them. I am a self taught “expert” in HTML, CSS, PHP and Javascript (jQuery). I am still learning Objective-C, Cocoa, Photoshop, Ruby on Rails and Python. It amazes me how quickly I can learn new things and how fun it can be!

I am a stickler for good design. I think it’s one of the most important things a product can have. I love simple and easy to use user interfaces. I greatly respect people like Tim Van Damme who create beautiful interfaces. I am also a huge fan of Loren Brichter of Atebits who created Tweetie, one of the most beautiful, seamless and smooth iPhone applications ever.

I am a compulsive TechCrunch reader, an an up and coming fan of Robert Scoble’s Building43.

That’s nice, but what do you do…?

I do a lot and very little at the same time. I’m an experimenter. I do lot’s of things for fun. Some things turn out to be better than others. But, everything I’ve done has taught me a lot.

One of the first experiments that I recall was in third grade. My friend and I had created a mock company and would often meet and discuss our plans to make a radical, world changing product.

In fourth grade, I started a little gig where I would help others with their computers. I had a lot of fun with this, especially as it was my first paying “job”.

Logically, I moved onto fifth grade where I started another project. It started when a family friend asked me to teach an underprivileged family how to use their newly donated computer. This inspired me to start collecting old computers from our neighborhood, fix them up, and donate them to needy families.

In between this, I have continued with my consulting gig, helping numerous people use their computers.

Eight grade though tenth grade (aka present), I worked with Lisen Stromberg on both her summer blog (Invincible Summer) and her professional website (PrismWork).

I’ve also been working with my dog trainer on redoing his website. Also, I’ve worked with my mom and designer Jeremy Dorsey to create a website from her nonprofit on campus counseling agency, Cassy Bay Area.

Over the summer, I worked with my brother, Levi, to create a Twitter service called Twitloc. The idea was to act as the intermediary, allowing people to geotag their tweets by paring tweets from twitter with extra metadata stored on our site. We were also focusing on creating an exploration platform to allow people to easily explore geo data associated with a tweet. It would provide for an easy way to get valuable information associated with the location of the tweet.

Since Twitter has announced their Geo API, we’ve decided to take our project in a different direction. We will be creating an awesome (if I do say so myself) way for people to view Tweets in a location based context. Stay tuned. It shall be exciting.

Recently, I have joined Teens in Tech Networks as a marketing manager as the lead of Facebook and Twitter based marketing.

Aside from these “official projects”, I’ve created a bunch of random things that I take great pride in. More on that later.