About Me

Hi, I'm Sarah Writtenhouse.

Wouldn’t you love a technology crystal ball you can gaze into and see what new and exciting innovations are coming? I certainly would.

Of course I’m not really a fortune teller, but some think of me as a sort of oracle because I have strong intuition and a keen sense when it comes to the tech industry. I can see shifts in the market before they happen, mostly because I’ve been immersed in technology all my life.

A Techie is Born

Apple in the 80s
When I was a kid, my dad worked for Apple, and we had a couple of Apple II computers set up in our unfinished basement. I remember the graphics were made up of keyboard characters arranged across the screen to make shapes. I spent hours playing Star Trek, battling Ks (Klingons) and saving my progress to an 8 in. floppy disk with “Sarah’” written on it in marker.

Mainframes and magnetic tape
Later, my dad got a job at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), the mainframe computer company. Visiting his office was memorable, especially the “computer room”. It was encased in glass so visitors could see the computers in action. I vividly remember watching the magnetic tape reels spinning forward and backwards over and over again. It wasn’t until years later in my Finite State Machine class at UC San Diego, that I understood what the reels were doing.

Teraflops
UCSD is home of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC). One of my fondest college memories was a tour of the facility. The main datacenter was full of Sun and Cray machines. It also had a cutting-edge, 3D printer students could use if they signed up on the clip board hanging on the wall. We were told the supercomputer was capable of processing more than a teraflop (over a trillion computations per second). That made my heart skip a beat, I was in love.

Biotech beach
I took an internship at a Biotech company that designed cloning systems for the Human Genome Mapping project. I tested software, hardware and helped migrate our codebase from Visual C++ to .NET when it was released in 2002. It was an exciting time.

Read the Tea Leaves — Right Place, Right Time

Since then, I’ve worked in tech for almost 25 years. I’ve taken on many roles — Software Developer, SQA Engineer, Integration Engineer, Product Manager, just to name a few. I’ve worked as a contractor, an FTE and have been a hiring manager in several positions.

I tell you all this, not to be a blowhard, but to illustrate my experience in tech. I know the tech market inside and out. I’ve learned mostly through trial and error but sometimes when my sharp sense kicks in, I somehow end up in the right place at the right time.

Find me
Sarah Writtenhouse – Medium
Sarah Writtenhouse - LinkedIn