Ann is a java and rails developer who likes to see what happens to distributed systems when you unleash thousands of requests per second at them. She developed an interest in distributed systems at Amazon.com, where she worked on application development, architecture, and system scaling with community and vendor services applications. Ann is not afraid of multicast packet storms.

Recently she has been building applications using Amazon Web Services platforms like EC2, S3, and SQS and is interested in building better computation and deployment systems that benefit from utility computing strategies like pay-per-use hardware and auto-scaling.

In the past Ann was lucky enough to work on a handful of interesting research projects as an undergrad at Carnegie Mellon, including a speech recognition engine, a music search engine, an interactive steganography message encoding system, and provably secure password formulas.

When Ann is not pushing bits onto the elastic compute cloud she plays jazz and rock music with a local all-nerd band and faithfully reads internet cartoons like XKCD.