Gadgetory

what's up everybody my name is David and mal amel imal however you want to say it I don't really care because I don't really know how to say it myself and here Android Authority we like to do a little thing we call meet the team and given recent circumstances I figured this would be a good time for me to do a little meet the team video myself so I was born and raised in a little town called smartville California which is kind of way up north near Lake Tahoe but I spent all of my time in that a city in Grass Valley California where I went to school did elementary school in high school there if I could break myself into three main hobbies I'd probably say that it is computer hardware technology jazz and drumming and also writing I've been really into drumming all of my life so when I was five I joined this group called Grass Valley taiko which is these large drums that you hit with these giant sticks called bocce and we would perform all throughout California and I did that until I was 14 but when I was in middle school I joined the school jazz band and have just been playing jazz and funk music and all that kind of stuff all throughout my entire life in high school actually formed this band called loose cannon mariachi which is also a huge part of my life we are not currently together anymore but it was a scotch jazz rock Orchestra and we had drums bass guitars saxophone trumpet everything so that was that was definitely the most musical part of my life and I still haven't been able to play as much as I would like where I'm currently at now but I'm hoping to jump back into that soon as far as writing is concerned I've kind of always just been a writer as a hobby in high school I wrote I know it sounds really dramatic but I wrote tons of poetry and that kind of just eventually translated into writing for blogs into stuff that I really enjoyed so that kind of blends itself into the tech part of my life now as to how I got into technology I was kind of really really into Nintendo and Pokemon as a kid myself kind of am obviously but when I was five I got my first video game which was pokemon gold version but we got a first computer around that same time too and this whole electronics thing kind of interests me I would started tinkering with our computer my parents had no idea what they were doing with it so my sister and I would just kind of mess with it look inside you know those gold Dell HP compact cases I get blamed for all the problems which was probably our fault yeah when Google search kind of started blowing up that just like blew my mind because it was like you could get any information at any time and to me that was like the most crazy thing of all time and even when I was like in middle school elementary school I was just like how how is it that we are not utilizing this to a solar potential so this is when the technology bubble was bursting everyone was just freaking out so I thought that was absolutely amazing I would just sit on the computer for hours and be googling things and going on Yahoo Answers because that's where he found the information back then when I was in middle school we had a thing called Gilmore News Network which was kind of this thing with we would put on with the teachers before school we learned how to use all these cameras and all this editing software and we had Apple computers that were donated that we were working on just kind of learning Final Cut Pro and all this stuff as like little kids so that was really cool that that was amazing because I got to learn how to use all the computers all the software all the camera stuff and I just got really interested in kind of like media in general so we didn't really have anything like that at my high school but I did start the technology and business club at my high school which was a very similar thing but rather it was just we would meet every week and we would talk about like what's happening currently in technology and all the stuff that's going on we had a senior project that we had to do when I was graduating high school and what I chose to do was create an Android app so it was this little app called turtle tank which was dumb but you know it's an app and you were just like this little turtle with a triangular shell and then as you level up you get more shapes for your shell so you get a square and then Pentagon and hexagon so forth you shoot pellets it was really dumb I did it for hackathon but it was really fun and it kind of like made me really really really excited about Android so if we kind of back up a little bit to the beginning of high school that's when Android was kind of first starting to like blow up blow up I was actually able to convince my mom to let me get a smartphone because Google Maps came out and that became a thing and I convinced her that I can find myself anywhere anytime I can find my way back to you which was like a great reason it was a good convincing text expected but I remember I just was like researching the heck out of these phones and the Droid Bionic was the phone that I just started being completely obsessed with and going on Google News and setting tags and getting email or every single time a new news article published about this phone and of course ended up being one of the most delayed phones of all time which was terrible but essentially when Verizon was switching off of the unlimited data plan thing that's when I was like okay you know I'm done waiting for this phone I just need to get unlimited data so that I can do some limited data things I ended up picking up a HTC Thunderbolt this phone was amazing and I still miss it at a kickstand it burned my hands oh it overheated when I was using Skype and like all this stuff together now you don't need to know all this stuff HTC Thunderbolt was amazing but I had to return it and I fished it out for a Droid Charge which was a far worse phone and was one of the worst decisions I've ever made but I digress anyway after high school I went to UC Santa Cruz for college I originally majored in straight computer science because I was just really into Google and everything and Android and I just really wanted to be the head of Android at Google eventually a very very long pipe dream of mine so we'll see if I ever comes through obviously not happening right now then my sophomore year at UC Santa Cruz I discovered that we had this kind of dual major thing it's called technology information management but it's kind of a combination between computer science and economics so as soon as I found that out I was like oh my gosh I have to get into this like right now so I switched majors and if the next year I had joined the technology Information Management Association I became the president of the Association the next year we went on company tourists we mused we went to Google and Apple and Yahoo but my freshman year of college I really wanted to start writing and I met someone who worked at this blog called one tech stop net which was a phone blog which is what I've been wanting to do forever and so he told me he worked at this small blog which was a Windows Phone centric blog it was it was you know technically focused on Windows Phone but I really just wanted to start writing I really just wanted to get a portfolio out there so I asked him like can you ask your boss if you might be able to possibly you know get a writing job there so we asked him I wrote a couple articles for them and then they hired me so I worked at one tech stop for about two years basically I worked there from early in my sophomore year of college until sometime around my senior year probably halfway through I made a bunch of reviews for that channel the video quality is probably not great I'm pretty sure everything is really slow now as I really didn't know that much about camera as a passed point but again it was just an amazing way to get a portfolio so that I could later apply these other places that's kind of how I got started with these text journalism thing so also well about halfway through college I actually landed a job at Intel as a systems engineer so intelligence Santa Clara California and I lived in Santa Cruz California so I started commuting an hour and a half to two hours every single day I was working on their server stacks and we were kind of installing new data centers doing the computer hardware thing because I was really really into like building pcs and I would do it for people for side money and all that stuff so I worked for them for about a year doing that and then I got promoted to being a project manager for their wearable devices systems things so I worked on a lot of the wearables and victory chips that they used in a lot of these wearables but I had applied to Android authority probably eight to nine months before that just you know seeing what was out there and then I got an email on the way to work one day and they said hey like we're opening this new thing called VR swords being a technology nerd like we all are yeah virtual reality is awesome you know it's really cool so I said yeah of course I kinda I still was technically in school but I would go to work it Intel full-time and then during my lunch I would do VR source articles and I'd go home try to figure out what technically the professor's did in class that day and then I would do my homework and then I would write like one or two more articles and this was kind of a daily ritual and then like sometime along the line there I was finishing up with school and I was kind of tired of doing the nine-to-five office job thing and until I was mostly just tired of commuting an hour and a half every single day and so I kind of talked to the Android authority people I said you know my passion is really in writing and informing people about technology and not really being in this kind of giant corporate structure like I thought it would be because I always really really wanted to work for Google so Intel was like you know up there with Google for me but I kind of learned that hi like I really like journalism a lot more and it's fun to like me people talk to people help inform people about technology interact with people to talk to them for a while and I said you know you've been working us for us for a long time now and if you want to come on a full-time on board then you can so I quit my job at Intel I move San Francisco and that's where I'm at right now you guys just recently found my first Android authority video which I know that I'm making it better I'm trying to get better but this is kind of me diving straight in to this video side of things so please bear with me while I learn kind of just learning over time taking your feedback and figuring out like what works and what doesn't so it's a piece of process so so thanks so anyway that's kind of where we're at today and I really hope that you guys will bear with me as I kind of learn all the ins and outs of this industry it's been like my dream for a really long time so I'm kind of like finally living it finally where I want to be and I think that I can inform you and the best way possible so thanks again and if you're interested in the lives of anyone else we've got a whole meet the team section on YouTube that you can go look at you know we've got Josh lon J Joe everyone's over there so go take a look and make sure you hit the little subscribe button down below and also the bell so that you get notifications for videos like this you for this feel but I really hope to see you guys soon so thanks again