Not sure that I'm a "valley-type techie" since I don't do web development... but I am in Silicon Valley, so here goes... During middle and high school my passi

Not sure that I'm a "valley-type techie" since I don't do web development... but I am in Silicon Valley, so here goes... During middle and high school my passions were physics and computers, but I never thought that computing could be anywhere near as fun as doing lab science. So I did a B.S. in Physics and a bunch of nano-scale and solid-state research, then went on to grad school in materials science and worked on polymer and colloidal physics and microfabrication. I still think that the degree in Physics was the best thing I could have done at the time, and I learned a ridiculous amount from it. During grad school I learned that academia involved far more grant-writing and politics than I enjoyed, and that I really did enjoy working with computers more than doing bench science. I left with a Masters and got into high-performance computing, doing a lot of sysadmin and a little software development on compute clusters with a small company doing HPC as a service. These days I'm in Silicon Valley (Santa Clara), but I still work on HPC clusters (at Nvidia) and I'm still heavily focused on scientific and technical computing. I love what I do and I love that I'm still supporting scientists and engineers, though I do miss the lab bench occasionally. I still read a lot about physics, but my work and most of my side projects are focused on HPC. More importantly, I have a wonderful wife who plays roller derby and two cats that demand an inordinate amount of attention; I fence epee, and have since college; I play a lot of board games, read a lot of science fiction, and still pick up my trumpet every once in a while. Life is good most days. :)