My name is Joel Parish and I’m originally from Camarillo, California. I’m computer enthusiast and have been working with various programming languages for more than half my life. Currently, I’m studying Computer Science at the University of Rochester (in Rochester, NY).

I enjoy the performing arts (Theatre), computer programming and pass the time playing the guitar and pushing the limits of things which were not designed to be pushed so far.

When I was fifteen I wrote up AjaxTrans as a quick interface design project. “Ajax” was a hot buzzword at the time and I was getting sick of seeing hundreds of “live-search” examples (where a search would try to bring up partial matches while you type). These live-searches were flawed in that the user in the vast majority of cases already knew the full query term they were looking for. Bringing up results for “cyanide” when the user is trying to find “cynical”, only two letters into the query is both a waste of resources, and useless. Translation seemed to be a middle ground between flashy interface and functionality. I was taking high-school Spanish classes at the time and remember having to type in a word at a free translation website and wait five seconds for a page full of ads to load before I saw the result of my query. Hopefully AjaxTrans is similarly useful for others.

Recently I’ve been pretty busy between work and school, but you can occasionally catch me lurking in #haskell (on freenode) trying to glean something from the brilliant folks over there.

This summer I’m working with Redspin Inc. in beautiful Carpinteria, CA as an Intern Security Engineer. Redspin does security audits for banks and casinos, and my primary responsibilities revolve around penetration-testing. I get paid to try and “hack” banks, casinos, and mid-to-large enterprise companies! It’s loads of fun, and a very learning intensive, research driven job and all-together rewarding job. Corporate culture is relaxed, and we’ll have company meetings on the beach (a short distance from our offices). Often the engineering team will take a break to go play beach volleyball.

Feel free to contact me with any questions you may have regarding AjaxTrans!