Hi, My name is Jan. I'm a software engineer living in Santa Clara, California. I'm married to great guy and we share our life with a couple of bratty felines.
I grew up mainly in the Midwest United States, Michigan and Illinois. Also, I spent several years on the East Coast, in the Northern New Jersey area during my teens, graduating from Teaneck H.S. in 1978.
After attending Community College for a short time while still in New Jersey, I entered the work force as a full time employee first as a Bank Teller and later as an Investments Clerk working in a Commercial bank.
After finding that I wanted to pursue more challenging work, I decided to return to college full-time and my Grandparents helped me out financially to do that.
So, I returned to Michigan and began life as a full-time college student at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, MI. At first I thought about studying finance. So, then since I already had some experience with accounting, I started working on an Accounting Major. During the process of filling out base requirements for the B.B.A program, I fell in love with Computer Programming. After talking to an Academic Advisor (who tried to talk me out of Computer Science) I changed my area of study to Operations Research and Information Systems. Which was a computer oriented study, but from within the Business College.
After graduating from Eastern in 1984, I came out to the West Coast to find work in the Computer Programming field. I interviewed with a few DoD contractors and found some interesting leads. But not what I really saw myself doing. On a whim I attended a local job fair while staying with a relative in Southern California. That led to a couple of interviews in Northern California. Which led to some job offers. I decided to accept a job with HP as a software design engineer.
I was at HP a long time, the largest chunk of my career thus far, 14 years, and eventually was pulled in a different direction after working on the hp-ux kernel for many years. The different direction I went was to go to SGI and work on a video streaming server product.
Then the tech boom was really taking off and again I found the pull of a new opportunity. I landed in the Data Storage field at a NAS company called Network Appliance. I had a wonderful 7 years there, learning a great deal and then again found a new opportunity at another Storage company that was still very small and still a startup. And Data Domain is that not so small company which later got gobbled up by EMC. My focus there was on disk drivers and platform software. From there I went to another storage company and back to a small company called BlueArc and we do NAS Gateways. And I work on Parallel NFS.
I have varied interests. I'm a sports nut through and through. Ice Hockey being in my blood from growing up in the Midwest. I'm a Sharks Fan and season ticket holder. I also follow the San Francisco Forty-Niners.
Besides spending much of my waking hours with computers for my job, I come home and spend more time with computers for fun.
I also really enjoy listening to music. I'm always putting together more playlists and finding and experimenting with both old artists and new artists alike. I have moved my CD collection to digital form and stream music through a whole house audio streaming system at home. Also, I use Rhapsody, Pandora and RadioTime as other sources for musical content.
Another theme that's been part of me is animal protection advocacy activities. In the past I've been involved in TNR feral rescue work as well as foster-adopt programs through a local animal rescue group. And lately, I'm becoming more involved with the Humane Society United States (HSUS) and also my local shelter - Humane Society Silicon Valley (HSSV).
Immediate term goals include taking some college classes to study more of the technology in my current field. This is for both making my everyday job easier, but also to help in the possible transition to a more hardware-based focus then I currently have in my job.
I only use Linux at home. No Windows systems at home at all. Also, no Macs either.
I don't much care for reality TV. Also, I'm more likely to take better care of my computer than I do of my hair for instance. No one could ever call me a girly-girl. And on the Facebook Barbie Quiz I got rated a Barbie Killer.
I can watch a whole day of football on Sunday, starting with the morning game, then the main afternoon game, and then finish off with Sunday Night football. And this is my idea of a great Sunday! An even better time is to attend both Niners and Sharks games in person. I especially love the crowd energy at playoff games. My hope soon is to see my beloved Sharks in a Stanley Cup Finals round. Like this year! I also have a dream whereby I want to see a hockey game in every hockey city before I die. So far (besides San Jose, the Tank, which feels like a second home) I've attended hockey games Detroit, Chicago, Tampa Bay, and Vancouver. So many more to go...