Bio

Hi! I'm Fitz. My "day job" is in Developer Relations for Google. There, my job is to teach developers how to use the APIs and developer tools that Google creates. That means one part learning, one part teaching, and one part building fun things to make those products more accessible. Before that, I was a software engineer, and before that a systems admin.

Interspersed throughout has been teaching: building courses for teaching academics how to use (and teach their students about) super computing, teaching new software engineers at Amazon about internal development practices, teaching Googlers how to conduct interviews, teaching basic coding to kids at a summer camp, and many, many more.

I've taught coding to kids as old as 8 and as young as 60+, held workshops as short as an hour and taught full-credit courses, given talks to audiences large and small, and coached and mentored people on both tech and career.

My main philosophy on teaching is that everyone can learn anything and that learning is a journey. If I just told you the answer to life, the universe, and everything, does that count as learning it? You might now know the answer, but without having gone through the process of getting there, it's not going to be very useful to you.

And so, ask me a question and I'm not likely going to give you a straight answer. :)

Things I've taught

Intro programming (using Java, Python, C, Logo... but not all at once)
Parallel Programming
Scientific/High-performance Computing
Web Development
Flutter, mobile development on Android
Technical Job Interviewing
Software Development

Werk werk.

Animals

I have two cats, Orange and Juice. They're brothers, around 3 years old (we think). My family always had dogs growing up, and I briefly looked after a stray Australia Blue Heeler after college, but couldn't keep him. :(

Favorite Websites

XKCD - An age-old favorite for laughs
Ars Technica - For tech news
For everything else

Currently...

Reading: Elysium Fire by Alastair Reynolds
Watching: Stargate Universe (again)
Learning to cook: Frozen breakfast burritos
Teaching: CSE 154

Random Facts

Spent better part of a year living in both California and Washington
Spent better part of this year remodelling my house
Mentors high school robotics
Was once (briefly) a volunteer EMT