User:Mekarpeles

Mek, born (Michael E. Karpeles), is an American computer scientist, internet entrepreneur, rock climber, and musician. He is a steward of digital rights, public libraries, and an advocate of open access information. He considers himself a knowledge mapping hobbyist and aspires to help people reach fuller potentials by facilitating meaningful access to empowering information. Mek presently serves this mission at Brewster Kahle's non-profit, the Internet Archive, where Mek directs OpenLibrary.org in memory of his personal hero, Aaron Swartz.

Mek is notable for wearing a purple shirt branded with his name, a concept inspired by Sai. In 2015, Mek started tracking various aspects of his life in a public spreadsheet. He self-identifies as a functional minimalist and has few (but not too few) belongings.

Mek currently lives at Moomin in San Francisco. He formerly lived in Mission District, San Francisco at Serapeum, an epicurean community house named after the Serapeum Temple of Alexandria, considered to be the daughter and backup to the great Library of Alexandria). Mek lives with his three housemates Ariel Liu, Mishal Afzal, and Bobi Rakova. His former roomates include Drew Winget, Sahar Massachi, and Jessy Diamond Exum.

Early Life
Karpeles was born in New Haven, Connecticut and lived at 190 Shagbark Court in Cheshire, Connecticut (in this room). In third grade, Mek became interested in computer programming after discovering the features of AOL Instant Messenger. Mek attended Cheshire High School and remained in Cheshire until college-bound at 18, at which time his parents, Dr. Richard Karpeles and Patricia Dimond Karpeles, relocated to 21 Wild Rose Drive in Nashua, New Hampshire.

College
In 2006, Mek attended undergraduate school at the University of Vermont (UVM) and received a bachelors of science in Computer Science. Here he led the Computer Science Student Association (CSSA) under advisory of Xindong Wu, Christian Skalka, and Joshua Bongard and met mentor, Dr. Gary Johnson, as well as friend and future business partner, Stephen Balaban. While at UVM, Mek was twice awarded the ACM Faculty award by the Department of Computer Science. During his junior year, as officers of the CSSA, Mek and Gary Johnson earned the opportunity to design and co-instruct a CS-095/CS-195 Special Topics course for three consecutive semesters. During his tenure at UVM, Mek interned at Microstrain, a wireless sensor company which later became LORD Sensing Systems. Much of his work relied on Aaron Swartz's web.py framework. In 2010, after graduation, Mek enthusiastically joined a PhD program at the University of Delaware to study computational linguistics. He was a teaching assistant for Richard Gordon's CISC 355 Computers, Ethics, and Society class and researched under Dr. Stephen Siegel in the Verified Software Laboratory.

Career
Shortly after, Mek suspended his graduate program to join Stephen Balaban as co-founder and CTO of Baybo Labs, a service which enabled self-publishers to create online stores to sell their digital merchandise. The team moved to San Francisco and in 2011 was acquired by Hyperink, a publishing startup from YCombinator's Winter 2011 batch where Mek spent the next year leading development of their hyperink.com platform. In 2013 Mek served a stint as ark.com's VP of Engineering before co-founding Hackerlist with Andrew Valish in 2013.