Hello, 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.
I’m not a fortune teller, but some see me as a sort of job market seer because I have strong intuition and a keen sense when it comes to the tech industry. I can often spot shifts in the market before they happen, not because I have magic powers but 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 form shapes. I spent hours playing Star Trek, battling Ks (Klingons), and saving my progress to an 8-inch floppy disk labeled “Sarah” in marker.
Mainframes and Magnetic Tape
Later, my dad got a job at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), a mainframe computer company. Visiting his office was unforgettable, especially the “computer room.” It was encased in glass so visitors could watch the machines in action. I vividly remember the magnetic tape reels spinning forward and backward over and over again. It wasn’t until years later, in my Finite State Machine class at UC San Diego, that I understood what those reels were doing.
Teraflops
UC San Diego is home to the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC). One of my favorite college memories was touring the facility. The data center was filled with Sun and Cray machines, and it even had a cutting-edge 3D printer students could use if they signed up on a clipboard hanging on the wall. We were told the supercomputer could process more than a teraflop—over a trillion computations per second. That made my heart skip a beat. I was hooked.
Biotech Beach
I later took an internship at a biotech company that designed cloning systems for the Human Genome Mapping Project. I tested software and hardware and helped migrate the codebase from Visual C++ to .NET when it was released in 2002. It was an exciting time to be in tech.
Read the Tea Leaves
Since then, I’ve worked in tech for nearly 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, a full-time employee, and even a hiring manager.
I share this not to brag, but to highlight the breadth of my experience. I know the tech job market inside and out. Much of what I’ve learned has come through trial and error, but every so often, when my job-sense kicks in, I find myself in the right place at exactly the right time.
Thank you for visiting.
— Sarah Writtenhouse
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