User:JordanSamuels

About me
My name is Jordan Samuels. Born 1970, I lived in West Lafayette, Indiana through high school. I grew up sure that I was going to be an academic, since my parents were both professors at Purdue University. They were in statistics, but I was more interested in pure mathematics.

I attended Washington University in St. Louis, majoring in math and minoring in computer science, and then went on to grad school in math at University of Chicago. However, at that point I lost the will to complete start a Ph.D thesis and I decided to go into software development for a living.

I studied classical piano through college, and then had classical training in voice during grad school and several years afterwards. I was a member of the Chicago Chorale.

I have two children, ages 7 and 15 months, and they are the greatest kids in the world.

I used to play Go quite a bit, then I quit for a while, and now I'm back. For a while I was fiercely studying Joseki but it's hard to keep up the momentum.

Computer stuff
I tried to learn the Dvorak, and I actually got up to around 40 wpm. But since I do a lot of pair programming, I got tired of reconfiguring keyboards all the time and I gave it up. Also, I type around 100 wpm in qwerty, and it was going to take a while to get up that fast in Dvorak.

I work in the finance industry as a software developer. My company, DRW Trading, trades options on interest rate instruments and commodities.

I was a C++ guy for a long time. Now I prefer C# or Java, because I think the complexity of the C++ language prevents developers from being agile.

Wikipedia
Although I hang out on Wikipedia a lot for a guy with two kids and a full-time job, I think I'm a beginner- or maybe an intermediate-level user. I spend time browsing and correcting minor mistakes like spelling and grammer, and I try to add links and tweak pages to make them more useful.

Believing that plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery, I have stolen most of the wikitext for this page from others, including User:Crazycomputers, who seems to be an expert at this sort of thing.