About

Hello! My name is Harrison Totty. I am really bad at writing "about" pages (and don't like those super short ones you see on other websites), so I'll just dive right into things.

I started programming at around 8 or 9 years old. Back then, I only really cared about game design (like most kids that get into programming I presume), but slowly I began to realize that I was really quite interested in programming in general. By highschool, I was writing everything from video game AI to torrent clients. This was also the time where I started getting into Unix-based operating systems (GNU/Linux in particular). I remember booting BackTrack 4 disks in the library to get around my school's proxy filter, and writing BASIC programs in my calculator for my AP Statistics and AP Physics classes. Growing up in the Florida panhandle was pretty strange, since I didn't know any other tech-savvy kids at my school.

I first went to college at the University of West Florida, where I studied Computer Engineering. I dropped-out after a year from being bored with the coursework but then decided to re-enroll a year later with a major in Physics instead of CE. It is through the Physics department that I re-discovered my real passion: Mathematical Physics. I managed to land a research position doing simulations of magentic vorticies in superconductors, whilst simultaniously getting a position to work for the school as a student systems administrator for the College of Science and Engineering. Through really stupid circumstances (which I will write a post on in the future), I was kicked-out for "hacking". Criminal charges were unfortunately pressed (but later dropped), and for more than a year I sat in my wife's apartment writing code without the ability to get a job or attend school. Once charges were dropped, my wife and I moved to Tallahassee, where she went to finish her degree in Chemistry at Florida State University. After taking some classes at Tallahassee Community College, I decided to apply to the summer school program at Wolfram Research, where I was accepted and successfully completed a project on building analogues of neural networks from graphs of boolean functions. When I was offered a position at Wolfram, I decided to forgo college and work remotely while my wife finished her studies at FSU.

I am currently a DevOps Engineer for the Web Systems group at Wolfram Research, where I manage all of the backend for the Wolfram Cloud infrastructure. I plan on eventually returning to school to get my degree in physics. Check my GitHub for projects, as I am constantly adding new things there.