My name is Joel Parish, and I’m a seventeen-year-old high school senior from Camarillo, California. I consider myself somewhat of a computer enthusiast and have been working with various programming languages for more than half my life.

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” but 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 class 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 with high-school but you can catch me lurking in #haskell (on freenode) trying to glean something from the brilliant folks over there. Or over at Project Euler solving some obscure problem in an attempt to learn a new programming language (or paradigm as i’ve been trying to solve it all in functional haskell).

I’m very interested in prospective internships and do small programming on the side, my resume [pdf] is plastered all over the site if you have not yet noticed. Don’t hesitate to contact me about anything. I’m available via IM nearly everyday after 4PM PST.