Hello, my name is Riley 🙂

Back in 2001, when I was 13.5 years young, my family bought a 56k modem. My parents would only allow me to use the web 1 hour a week, so I saved up my allowance, bought a 150’ phone cable, drilled a couple 1” holes in the wood floor while my parents were out, and army-crawled under the house to rout the phone cable to my room. I pieced back together a crappy old IBM ThinkPad 600 and would tiptoe at night to the office to switch the 56k modem over to my rooms cable-hack to play Age of Empires I online for hours on end, sometimes till dawn.

6 years later, during my freshmen year at San Diego State University, I received a phone call from my father about some strange holes he discovered in the wood floor while my parents were selling the house. Needless to say, at the time he wasn’t thrilled at how stunningly creative I had been in circumventing their moratorium on the internet, however in retrospect I now realize drilling those holes in the floor was one of the best things I ever did as it was in that moment that I fell in love with computers.

Currently I help engineer solutions to find the needle in the haystack of frontend errors at LinkedIn. On my free-time I help motivate others to learn to code through my own experience as a self educated engineer. I get stoked on creative people, products, and hard-to-solve problems.