About Me

Heads up! If you’re looking to get a snapshot of my professional career, head over to the experience page.

Synopsis

Hello! My name is Thorn Hall. I am 28 years old. I have two cats, Tofu and Soufflé, who are both 2 years old. I am a software engineer. I currently live in Marion, Illinois. In the following passages, I am going to detail my path through life, including how I became a software engineer.

Interests

• Video games (fun fact, I’m ranked in the top 1% of players in the world in rocket league.)
• Basketball
• Music (hip hop, rock, metal)
• Drums
• Programming
• Cats

Autobiography

Early life

When I was a young child, I spent a lot of time playing video games. Money was tight for our family and I was living with 4 other siblings, so we often had to share. When it wasn’t my turn to play a video game, I was either outside playing with kids in the neighborhood, or playing with toys enacting some story I imagined up.

As a child, I would say I was mostly defined by the following things, which would eventually play a role in how I became and excelled at being a software engineer. Those things were:

• My obsession with video games. As a child, I didn’t do any programming. My most extensive interaction with computers was through video games. This interest would later take part in guiding me to trying out an introductory computer science class in college.
• My interest in education and learning. I was most definitely a teacher’s pet. I loved school and pushing the limits of my brain. Learning is a constant in software engineering.
• My creativity and imagination. I would say a lot of my creativity has origins in watching Anime as a child, in addition to reading and making up imaginary stories for my toys. Creativity is often necessary when solving problems as an engineer.
• Living in poverty. I often did not have clean clothes. My shoes were always cheap and falling apart. In the summer when I didn’t have access to free school lunch, I would sometimes go many days without getting to eat. This instilled in me both a figurative and literal hunger that drove me to success.
• My parents were absent. I do not want to elaborate further, but I lived my childhood with people who should not have been parents. I went on to move away from my parents at the age of 12. This instilled in me a high level of autonomy, which is often necessary for engineering roles.
• Survival and high tolerance for stress. I was often struggling to survive, but I still performed well under difficult circumstances. I have a strong belief that this significantly enhanced my ability to handle incident response as an engineer.
• Reading. I read thousands of books as a child. This experience enhanced both my written and verbal communication skills. Software engineering is often more about communication than writing code.

Highschool

Would you believe I played basketball and ran track for multiple years? It’s hard to believe now, but I did. I was even point guard for the freshmen basketball team, which had a whopping 8 players. Unfortunately, my exercise-induced asthma (among other life circumstances) forced me out of sports. Besides sports, I also took part in an academic challenge called WYSE (World’s Youth in Science and Engineering.) I won multiple first and second place medals at various levels of competition in WYSE.

My freshman year, I lived with a close friend and his family. To this day I will say thank you to them for taking me in. Afterwards, my older brothers got their own place, and I moved in with them. My siblings played a significant role in poising me towards success. My older sister, Briar, drove me to school every morning for my junior and senior year.

I continued to do well in school. This was in large part due to the mentors that guided me, the peers who gave me their clothes, my brothers who gave me a place to stay and food to eat, and all of the people who believed in me. Eventually, I would apply to and be accepted by Stanford University as a QuestBridge scholar with a full scholarship. I went on to be a valedictorian in high school.

University

University was a struggle. I had to move across the country to a place where I didn’t know anyone. It had a completely different culture than what I was used to. I was also just a different demographic. To put it bluntly, most Stanford kids didn’t grow up poor and struggling to survive. I definitely had a lot to navigate here.

Thankfully, there is a program at Stanford called the Leland Scholars Program (LSP). In this program, they bring students together from underprivileged backgrounds to take classes together before their freshman year starts. This program allowed me to form connections with people who are more like me. I am deeply grateful for the experiences given to me by LSP, and the people I met there.

I could count on one hand the amount of times I had to take homework home up to this point. All the way through highschool I did all of my homework during school, so I never had to take it home. Boy, did this change at Stanford, and especially in Stanford Computer Science, where just one assignment could take several days to complete.

I entered Stanford as a premed with the plans to become a psychiatrist, but eventually I was converted to computer science after trying out the introductory class CS106A. I found out I was intrigued by how computers work, and that I’m skilled at and enjoy programming.

Computer science at Stanford was hard. There were many all-nighters spent finishing assignments. Many lectures were watched again and again at 2x speed. Many, many hours were spent debugging programs. Learning programming isn’t easy, and in hindsight is actually pretty hard to describe.

My time at Stanford wasn’t full of glory. I struggled in this environment as well, in large part due to my past. In the end, I prevailed. I got the degree. I learned a lot along the way. I’m thankful for my experience there and the people I met, but I do not wish to relive it.

With that being said, Stanford gave me a wealth of knowledge, skills, opportunities, and connections. I’m extremely lucky to have the privilege of attending there. I feel like my time was well-spent.

Post University - Present

After I graduated college, my job search began. I eventually interviewed at a startup called Shippo and was hired as a junior software engineer. I’ll go into more detail with my time at Shippo on the experience page. What I will mention here is that just 6 months into my time at Shippo, COVID hit, and Shippo went fully remote. I worked remote from 2020-2024. In November of 2024, I decided to part ways with Shippo in order to leave my comfort zone and seek out new challenges.

Conclusion

That’s it! I hope this gave you some context into who I am and my path to becoming an engineer. I’ll be going over my work experience more extensively on the experience page.