About Me
(for an explanation of the license plate, go here)
In the beginning …
The universe exploded into existence about 14 Billion years ago, in a blindingly hot, spastically vibrating burst of pure energy, which simultaneously shattered and spread, unfurling the bounds of space time as it went. Matter won its feud with antimatter, and the energy more boldly manifest itself as quarks, gluons, and other eccentricities. Eventually, very light atoms, with names like ‘hydrogen’ and ‘helium’ decided to show their heads.
It gets lonely floating in the ether, so these early atoms swirled together in energy orgies called stars. The lonely hydrogen atoms took off their electron clothes and furiously fumed and fused, mashing together in a maelstrom of matter, breaking the socioenergetic boundaries that typically keep protons a healthy distance away from each other, and, using neutrons as bonding agents, found themselves forming larger and larger nuclei, with kinky names like carbon.
Every party gets old eventually, and as the supply of sexy, single hydrogen nuclei dwindles and dissipates, the tipping point is reached and everybody bails more or less at once. There are so many of these hydrogen fellows, however, that this ’star’ deal happens all the time. About seven billion years ago, a star was formed in our neck of the cosmic woods. We call it the sun. Like most stars, this one drew a cloud of curious onlookers from throughout the universe, and as more matter learned what was going on, the heavier atoms felt nostalgic for the old days when it was asses to elbows and outrageously hot, but at least its not so goddamn lonely. So they decided to form their OWN supermassive bodies, called planets.
One of these planets, Earth, found itself in an orbit around the sun, at just the right distance to allow water to do pretty much whatever it felt like doing: melting and evaporating and condensing and freezing and subliming and everything in between. At first it was way too damn hot for the water to do much besides fume, but eventually things simmered down, and water found itself covering most of the planet.
Water has a way of making interesting things happen, things like photosynthetic prokaryotic organisms, which started converting the sun’s light into energy to support themselves, releasing oxygen as a waste gas in the process. The oxygen released by these organisms eventually became one of the dominant gasses in our atmosphere. The oxygen rich environment, although toxic to more primitive organisms, allowed for the existence of more complex manifestations of cosmic energy, manifestations utilizing such zany biological mechanisms as aerobic respiration. Freed from their dependency upon direct contact with the sun for energy, these organisms grew and evolved in tiny bursts, into all kinds of cool things, including human beings. The humans initially lived in Africa, and but spread themselves all over the world. A group of these humans, driven largely by a disdain for authority, made their way from Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, to North America, starting in the 1600’s. Later, around the early 1800’s, The Neyer family emigrated from Germany to Cincinnati, Ohio, and Northern Kentucky. My parents met each other at Stanford while Pursing Ph.D’s in Classics and Physics.
Education
I was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico. When I was 6 months old, the family moved to my Father’s hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio, where I grew up. I attended St. Xavier High School, widely suspected to be the best high school in the known universe. I graduated from St. Xavier in 2003, winning the Computer Science departmental award. I then attended Xavier University, where I majored in Computer Science, Math, and Applied Physics. I spent the summer of 2006 at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California, doing research at an NSF REU program. There, I decided that I really enjoyed Computer Science Research and wanted to go to grad school. I also learned to unicycle. I thought I wanted to get a Ph.D., so I attended Computer Science grad school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I became disillusioned with academic life, so I graduated with a Masters in Computer Science, in May 2009, with a focus in multicore computing.
Professional
I was first employed by my parents to watch my youngest sibling while they ran a math tutoring center called ‘Kumon.’ Eventually, I was promoted to grading papers and doing flashcards. I worked in food service for four different restaurants over a period of four years. I spent a day working as a contract laborer for a moving company. I ran the IT help desk for AtriCure, a medical device manufacturer. I was paid by the NSF to do research on traffic routing algorithms in optical networks at Harvey Mudd College. I worked on adding features and improving security in a distributed system for solving engineering problems at TechnoSoft, and I fixed bugs in source code management software at Seapine. I designed a tool for measuring Xbox Disc Load times under varying DVD Layouts at Microsoft. I have done consulting work, providing occasional technical support for Hi-Brew Technologies and other companies. I built scalable distributed algorithms and communication infrastructure for an electronic options market-making firm called Blue Capital. I worked for twilio as a software engineer, mastering the intricacies of twisted python, asterisk, node.js, and amazon web services. I am currently working for uber as a software engineer.