Zach Pearson Email & Phone Number

I didn't know it at the time but from the moment I first touched a computer, my fate was already sealed. Sitting there at eight and in total awe of the magic unfolding before me as I explored some unfamiliar system with a grassy hill in the background, I set off on an adventure to gain enough mastery of the machine to... trick my parents into thinking I wasn't playing (at the risk of aging myself) Flash-based games when they looked over. Over time the use cases of a child faded away and the use cases of a teenager appeared. It became a window to a vast, unknowable network of knowledge and my key to finding out the answer to any question I ever had, and I could never be on it enough to satiate my curiosity. And then there would be subtle things that I wanted to change about my environment, and I eventually installed Linux to have control over that, and it led me one level deeper: a whole new set of things to learn, experiences to have. Linux was closer to what I wanted but not exactly what I wanted out of the box. I had always imagined ways to make user experiences better, things I would have done to make things just so, to give people a feeling of ease using software, or to make it useful in these flowing, intuitive ways they didn't even know they wanted. But on that first install I felt as a stranger in a strange land, and I knew the only way forward was to learn to write software myself. My life changed in my first Computer Science course, and I have never looked back. My curiosity for the world in general, while still present, has been focused onto something I am proud to have passion for. I love code, the puzzle, the process, and the people I get to collaborate with. I think the fundamental question of applied science is how we can make the world better, and I'm at once humbled and overjoyed to be able to use my passion to help answer that question.