I grew up in Oakland, California. I attended Berkeley High School, during which time I found an interest in web and graphic design, and developed small websites for friends and family. I ran jacksonline.com, which won Celebrity Site of the Day, and I maintained a blog, sooperficial.com. During my senior of high school I drew comics and took photos for the student newspaper.

After high school I worked as a Web Producer at Mainsail Web Development in Berkeley where I did web design, production, and maintenance on websites for companies such as Yale School of Management, DuPont Lycra, Braincare, American Cancer Society, GCI Group, and VIA Magazine.

A year later I went on a trip to Asia (Japan, China, Tibet, Nepal, India, and Thailand) for three months (and took lots of photographs). On returning I attended Berkeley City College where I mostly took art and general education classes. I also worked on the student art and literary journal, and organized events and designed flyers for a student club. In the summer I spent three months in Mexico.

After taking a Intro to Linux/Unix course at Berkeley City College, I became interested in Linux, open source software, and programming, and decided to major in Computer Science. I transferred to Mills College in Oakland, CA where I  received the Dean's Scholarship and the Mary and Leonard Chan Scholarship in Computer Science. After earning my Computer Science degree I participated in CRA-W's Distributed Mentor Project at Duke University where I contributed to research on wireless sensor networks.