My name is John. I live in Orlando, FL, with my wife, two kids, and two dogs. I’m a software engineer at Meta, where I work on infrastructure that helps keep people safe across the family of apps. In my spare time I like to read books, watch movies, play pickleball, travel, and learn foreign languages.

Languages

I’ve always loved language, but it wasn’t until spending a summer in China in 2001 that I really started to learn a foreign language. I spent most of my 20s and early 30s in China, and I still speak Chinese quite well (though not as well as I did a decade ago, alas). Having spent the last eleven years in Texas, California, and now Florida, I have been slowly but surely improving my Spanish, and can now handle myself fairly well when traveling in Spain and Latin America, though I have a long way to go before I’d say I was any sort of fluent. In 2025, my wife and I plan to travel to Morocco for our 20th wedding anniversary, and so I’m starting to learn French because it feels like a more practical way to be communicative than to dive in Arabic (though I hope to learn a bit of Moroccan Arabic before I go, too, if just to say hello and goodbye and the like).

Programming

I’ve been writing programs since typing the listings out of the back of Highlights Magazine into an Apple IIe at my elementary school. I ended up a software engineer through a strange path that curved through political science and foreign language. Now I mostly work on people, not programs, but still am able to ship code from time to time. At the very least I still have the Advent of Code, which I look forward to greatly every year.