About Walter

A very brief bio. Still a work in progress.

I was born and raised in southern New Jersey. (For New Jerseyans, that's Exit 4 off the Turnpike). I spent 12 years through Moorestown Township Public Schools. At Moorestown High, I participated in a few activities, such as the Nutshell literary magazine, Quiz Bowl trivia team, and the math team. I also spent a lot of time taking my academic work too seriously.

For two summers, I interned at Lockheed Martin in Moorestown, NJ, where I did intranet development. This was back when the Web was a big new thing, and Netscape just had their IPO. That's where I first cut my teeth on Unix, Perl, and the like. For a high school student, it was a great experience.

The next stop in my life was only a 45-minute drive north, where I spent 4 years at Princeton University. At Princeton, I majored in computer science, to no one's surprise. On the whole, I'd have to say I studied a lot less in college than high school. At Princeton, I was a member of Charter Club and online editor at The Daily Princetonian.

For a few summers (and part-time during the school year), I worked as a software developer for a small entertainment software company called SilverSun, then located in my hometown of Moorestown. I wrote online games for various Web sites under contract, and I also developed our own sites, Puzzle Zone on AOL and puzzlepage.com on the Web. SilverSun was acquired by BoxerJam in late 1999. In the summer of 2000, I interned at Microsoft in Redmond, WA, where I was a software design engineer on Microsoft Outlook. It was the longest time I spent outside New Jersey, and the first time I experienced life on the West Coast.

I graduated from Princeton in June 2001. After spending a month-long trip through Europe, I moved out to Silicon Valley... Mountain View, California, to be exact. I was recruited out of college by Handspring, where I worked as a software engineer.

Most recently (February 2003), I left Handspring and joined Google as a software engineer in the AdWords group.

That's about it for now. If you're a long-lost friend, please feel free to get in touch.