I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and studied journalism at UC Santa Cruz. Later I explored my love of language from another angle as I earned an MA in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania. I caught the dot-com wave and worked as a website developer for several years, in Philadelphia and then in Edinburgh, Scotland, and eventually found that I had become a software engineer. My most recent job was at a natural language search company in the San Francisco area. I live in Oakland, CA with my husband, five-year-old daughter, and one-year-old son.