about me

greetings. thanks for checking out my corner of the internet. you're here, so i guess you want to know a little bit about me.

my name is adam neal pitchie. i was born august 22, 1985 @ 16:11 in columbia, mo.

until the 5th grade i grew up in longview, tx. the city's claim to fame is that matthew mcconaughey lived there. he actually lived across the street from my stepmother's parents, funny enough.

my 5th grade year i moved to kingsport, tn, where my father worked for eastman chemical company at their headquarters as a corporate attorney specializing in contracts. why kingsport, tn? the chemical plant sits along a river, making it an ideal location for cooling processes. also, tennessee has favorable corporate taxes, so there's that too, i suppose.

after moving to kingsport, in the 5th grade i was given the name 'big head' by a classmate. not sure why, but it stuck for the entire year. the same year, a local news crew came to interview all the students to ask them what they wanted to be when they grow up. my classmates replied in the typical fashion: doctor (cool), fireman (cool), astronaut (cool), but i replied that i wanted to be a 'tornado chaser'. having lived in texas, i was infatuated with the movie 'twister', and tornados themselves. i suppose this mindset stuck with me throughout life. my dad has this interview on vhs somewhere.

growing up, i was -- and still am -- obsessed with music and movies. i wanted to be a musician, as well as a film director. during the 24 hours in a day, i would estimate that i listen to music for 12-14 hours in that day, unless i really need to concentrate. i've also seen a lot of films during my rotations around the sun. my first foray into 'filmmaking' was for the game 'team fortress classic'. you can see it here. the video was the first to have a higher fps (~90fps) than others, and many in the community complained about not being able to play it on windows media player. i suppose i was a bit ahead of the curve on that one. my gaming handle was 'whitefox'. i don't know why i chose that name, but i think it's kind of cool now. i was especially good at the scout class, and even made it into the selective 'reflex' guild. playing offense and moving quickly suits me.

in 2004, there was a lan tournament for unreal tournament 2k3. there were ~50-100 people that competed in a last man standing deathmatch. being into games, i was familiar enough with the map to know a good hiding place (the rules didn't mention camping...a little naughty). everybody was busy playing, and i just camped in the spot, until they started showing my position on the big screen. the other players eventually caught on, but i already had a significant life advantage over everybody else, and won. the prize was a 32mb mp3 player. how times have changed.

i played the tuba in my middle and high school band. most notably, we went to the rose bowl parade in 2002. i carried a ~35lb sousaphone for 5.5 miles along the route. there were two people holding up a sign at the end of the route that said, 'you're halfway there'. after 5.5 miles of marching, i found that to be pretty funny.

i was a competitive swimmer in high school and college. i initially started out diving my freshman year, then the coach had me swim and realized i was pretty fast. i did sprints (50m/100m), and i made state my first year for freestyle and backstroke.

i'm jewish by heritage, but don't practice. as paul rudd said in 'in between two ferns: the movie': i'm not a practicing jew. i've perfected it.

before working in tech, i worked in tv and film in atlanta, ga. i was an assistant producer for a documentary filmmaker. i also worked as a location scout for being mary jane, and as a location assistant for the spectacular now.

on a personal note, i have a fascination with space, especially black holes. i remember flipping through my dad's copy of a brief history of time when i was in 3rd grade when i lived in longview, tx (which coincidentally is a green day song). i obviously didn't understand it at the time, but space, rockets, black holes, and physics have fascinated me for a long time.

i've lived in the san francisco bay area for the last 10 years, with a brief stint in eugene, or, for a year. i have previously lived in dallas, los angeles, atlanta, and seattle. i am a cat dad to my fur baby, moma, a 1 year old domestic shorthair. we both share august birthdays. i have a photo of her on my instagram. she is currently the background on my phone. ❤️

i'm a technological generalist. i can do mostly anything technologically, just not as well as an expert. i have one patent to my name, with more to come.

some 'career' highlights include:
- building out a fairly comprehensive ios app for a startup, solo, in a couple of months. this was before swiftui and faster iterations.
- i helped a client bypass the great firewall of china to connect to their corporate network overseas via vpn. this was nontrivial, since you had to encapsulate and configure a vpn connection via the shadowsocks proxy from scratch. this is fairly commonplace now with most vpn providers. i guess the word got out.
- i'm currently working on a lot of exciting ai stuff. stay tuned.

i hope you enjoy my corner of the internet. i'm constantly curating it just for you.