Kevin Rothi

About Me

I grew up in Southern California, mostly the Orange County area. When I was a young man, my interests were video games, playing guitar, and reading (mostly science fiction). I was a huge Star Wars fan. I enlisted in the USMC Infantry straight out of high school, 0341. I was enlisted from 2005 to 2009. When I had completed my tour of duty, I moved back to Orange County to start the next chapter of my life.

I wasn't completely sure what I wanted to do next, but I knew I wanted to be some kind of scientist or engineer. I started taking classes at the local community college to get some credits knocked out and see what resonated with me.

I took a class on C++ programming, and immediately decided that that was what I wanted to do with my career. I fell in love with programming, and took every course they offered on the topic. What pulled me in was that programming was challenging, but I could always solve the problem if I applied my mind and didn't give up. If I kept hammering on it, I knew I would eventually crack it, and that was thrilling to me. I love that feeling of finally solving a hard problem.

It was around this time that I also started to fall in love with Ableton Live. I started using Ableton in 2009, originally to record some folk songs I had written on guitar. The software is extremely powerful, the most powerful music production software, and I was curious what else it could do besides simple recording. What I realized is that Ableton Live is the perfect intersection of two things I am very passionate about: Music and technology.

The complexity of the software is daunting. It's not easy to learn, the opposite, but I read the manual, started to read forums and discussion boards, and started to watch YouTube content, which was still a fairly nascent thing at the time, but Ableton producers had already started to make content showing how to use Live, sharing their tips and tricks and advanced techniques in addition to the fundamentals. I never stopped learning and working on projects, always just trying to improve my skills and output. I mostly make EDM these days. I've produced music under something like a dozen aliases and pseudonyms. deadmau5 is probably my most significant influence.

It was also around this time that I started to become interested in Buddhism. This is a very personal topic for me, and it's something that I've become more serious about as I've grown older. Some of the claims that are made in Buddhist thought, writing, and philosophy have aligned with my experience such that I accept them as true. I believe those claims are well justified by evidence. I do not accept some claims as true because I do not feel that they are well substantiated, and I also disagree with many prominent teachers with respect to what the teacher we now call the Buddha actually believed and taught as his doctrine.

The Thai forest tradition teacher Ajahn Buddhadasa Bhikkhu is the teacher I have read whose interpretation of the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama as described in the Pali Canon most closely align with my own. If you're interested in understanding how I relate to this topic, you can read his books and assume that what he's describing is pretty close to what I believe and accept as true. If you're interested in reading some of my own thoughts on the matter, I occsionally post them under the Buddhist Philosophy section nested under Writing on the left of this page.

After wrapping up my general education requirements at the community college, I transferred to UC Irvine to complete my undergraduate education in computer science. I learned a lot at UCI, and I am grateful to the staff for teaching me. I attended a career fair and handed out my resume to some companies, and that was how I landed my first job as a software engineer. I was a consultant, something of an optimal job for a new grad, and I worked on projects for companies that didn't need or want to hire a fulltime engineering staff because they just needed a specific app or software tool for their business.

Subsequently, I worked at a startup for a while, and that's where I really honed my full stack web development skills working with typical stacks, JS frameworks, that kind of stuff. It was a ton of work as the company was trying to scale and running into many challenges. I eventually started to get burned out, and it was at this time that I heard from UCI that I'd been accepted to go back for grad school to get my Master's. I quit the startup and focused 100% on school. The GI Bill, the money for school that the government awards you for completing a tour of duty, paid for it completely. Tuition and a check for rent and stuff. I had paid for my community college classes out of pocket knowing that I would want to go to grad school.

I had taken an intro class in AI and machine learning as an undergrad, but it wasn't a deep dive into topics that I was interested in. I knew that AI and ML were going to be big, important topics in computer science and the software industry, and I had always been fascinated by the idea of intelligent machines. I remember watching Star Wars as a kid and wondering if we would ever build machines like C-3PO and R2-D2. I wanted to learn everything I could about neural networks, deep learning, and anything else that would be useful with respect to building computer programs that could perform functions we would describe as intelligent.

I loved grad school. I was very interested in what I was studying, and it was rewarding for me. I was very successful, and lined up an internship at Google as I was wrapping up. The intership went well, and I went through the process to become a fulltime Googler. It was always an aspiration for me to work for the big G, and I had accomplished my goal.

I now work on Google Analytics building intelligence features into the product. It's challenging work, but I find it to be rewarding and impactful. I work alongside brilliant and capable engineers and tech professionals, and I am grateful to call them my colleagues.

On the weekends I still product music, and I'm learning to play the drums, something I should have done a long time ago. I have two cats and a dog, and they're a source of great joy for me. Life is unpredictable, and it's impossible to know what tomorrow will bring, but I am grateful for the life I have now. I hope to do good in this world.