I'm a strongly intellectual person with a passion for helping others. I'm usually very kind, but I am also extremely determined and ambitious in achieving my goals, which are more about the world than about me. I love to communicate about thoughts, ideas, and beliefs, and believe that communication and understanding are the universal solutions to all things.

My idea of fun is going somewhere I've never been before, learning something I didn't know, having a great conversation with somebody that I really enjoy talking to, or working on a real-world solution to an important problem. I'm adventurous while also staying ethical and focused.

I also tend to be pretty lighthearted--in most of my interpersonal interactions I'm silly instead of "serious." Even when I'm not being straight-up ridiculous, I'm still very friendly and enthusiastic.

I'm a software engineer at Google, which I love. In particular, right now I work on YouTube. I also have published a book with O'Reilly Media. It's about the fundamental laws of software development, based on my experience and research. Besides my work at Google I also go around speaking at various places about the book and its message of simplicity and science in software.

Although I really do a lot of things in the field of computers, this shouldn't give you the idea that they are my sole passion. I love creating and listening to music, I'm super-social, I love to get out, and helping people is one of my greatest interests.

Singing. I've been doing it nearly every day since I was four years old.

I've also been fixing computers since I was eight years old and have been writing software professionally since I was 14.

I'm generally big on communication, as you likely determined from my self-summary. I enjoy having great conversations with people about our thoughts, passions, or lives.

I also do a lot of songwriting. If you send me a genre and a subject, I'll write you a song with a melody line, a verse, and a chorus in 15 minutes. (This is an actual offer. I may choose to veto some genres or subjects, but feel free to ask for anything you'd like.)

People say different things. People generally like my eyes a lot, or some people comment on my eyebrows. I seem older than I am (I always have) and I talk almost exactly the same way as I write. I laugh loudly, I'm extremely communicative, and I'm quite genuinely happy. I would imagine many people notice that I'm singing in public.

You know what's interesting, though? What people notice first about others is often more about the person doing the noticing than about the person being looked at. People usually have some specific thing that they notice first in all others. Most people never think about it until you ask, but it's an interesting difference between individuals. For example, from a distance, I tend to notice people's hair first, and then their face if I can see it, but I'd never thought about this until somebody asked me. These don't reflect what I care about in my friends and partners, they just indicate the physical aspects I see first when I look at people.

Books: Stranger in a Strange Land (Robert Heinlein), Cat's Cradle (Kurt Vonnegut), The Wheel of Time series (Robert Jordan), The Chronicles of Amber (Roger Zelazny), The Gunslinger (Stephen King), Cosmicomics (Italo Calvino), A Song of Ice and Fire (George R. R. Martin), Codex Alera (Jim Butcher)

Movies: What Dreams May Come, Braveheart, Spirited Away, Amélie, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Fight Club, The Truman Show, Winged Migration, Princess Mononoke, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Inception, The Shawshank Redemption, Brain Candy

TV: Covert Affairs, White Collar, Chuck, Kings, Kyle XY, Whose Line Is It Anyway, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, Don't Trust the B--- In Apartment 23.

Music: I have roughly 4000 songs in my Spotify library, in almost every genre. I'm hugely into music--both obscure and popular. Music is one of my major passions in life. Here's a list of the artists I've been listening to the most lately.

Food: Thai food, tapas, sushi, Peruvian, Arabic, Greek, French, Italian, American, and also...pretty much every other kind of food in the world. I love to go out to new restaurants and try new things.

I seem to lack the wanderlust exhibited by so many of the profiles on my match list here on OkCupid. It's not that I don't enjoy traveling--I really do. But I know who I am, I know what is going on in the world better than almost anyone I know, and I know what I am doing about it right now. I'm completely fine to be wherever I am, as long as in that space I'm accomplishing my goals. If I were going to travel, the reason would be to do something for myself or the world, not just to see the places. At least, that's how I feel right now. I still like hearing about people's travels; I just don't have any deep craving to engage in them myself right now in my life.

I love meeting new people--it's one of my favorite activities in the world. I would be pretty excited to go out and get tea, go to the park, have a sandwich, play music together, or just hang out and talk. The first step is just to say hi, so say hi and see how that goes! :-)