Quinn Slack

Me in Hong Kong, March 2008I am a Stanford undergrad ('11) majoring in math or computer science (not sure yet).

I enjoy programming in Python, C++, Ruby, and sometimes Objective-C. I'm particularly interested in Web search, since it links so many different areas of CS: distributed systems, scalability, databases, numerical methods for computation, machine learning, etc. I am keeping track of the books, papers, sites, and software that are helping me learn about Web search and related areas.

I also have an interest in China and speak Mandarin. If that describes you, too, then you'd like my Chinese dictionary iPhone app and Web site. I like traveling and staying in China, and not only because it's the only place I could possibly afford to go. My travel photos are on Flickr.

This summer I am staying on campus at Stanford. I'll read a lot, bike a lot, and work on programming projects for fun. My primary goal for the summer is to implement from scratch a simple distributed Web search system: distributed indexing, ranking calculation, and querying. I don't know if I can do that all in 3 months, but I'll learn a lot regardless. Soon I'll put up another site for that project.

From mid-August to early September, I'll be traveling through Asia, to Tokyo, China, and other places. See my itinerary.


Last modified: Wed Jun 24 18:51:47 -0700 2009