Dr. Alfred Higgins
Caitlin Tucker
Reno McAllister
Tara Kajuru
Gordon Dubrovsky
Chip Dubrovsky

Gordon Dubrovsky

Gordon Dubrovsky is a child prodigy software designer. He lives with his mom in San Francisco - he’s the primary breadwinner in the house at the moment, and his main source of income is not even his job, but royalties from a patent he holds for converting video files for use in gaming formats.

Gordon was born in 1992 in Philadelphia. His dad Art was a successful real estate mogul in rural Pennsylvania, at one time owning the third largest private stables in the state. After his dad lost everything in the bursting of real estate bubble and disappeared with his secretary, Gordon rededicated himself to his class work, and especially computer science.

Displaying a monumental natural talent for coding at a very tender age, Gordon graduated from high school a year early and started working at a bustling downtown San Francisco dot-com trying to get to market with a video-realistic multiple player online game. His coding is elegant and sturdy, and he has serious responsibility for delivering the look and feel of the game.

After working on video algorithms and trying to explain comparative frame rates to product managers and investors all day long, Gordon really loves to escape into one of his zillions of computer games, shut down his analytical brain and just chase electrons across the screen.

He doesn’t socialize very much for a 17-year-old, but he’s under a lot of stress, too. He’s got a FaceBook page and a Twitter account, though he’s not sure why yet. He usually interacts with other people via a game interface. He’s very happy to play chess with players anywhere on earth, without ever even knowing their age or gender. His favorite old-school game is Altered Beast, but he’s adept at everything from Super Mario Brothers to HALO 3. He puts it simply: “Games are my life.”

Recently, by building beats and creating basslines on his hotrodded Powerbook, he has started to get out in the world a bit more by playing in the unofficial ShuffleTime employee band, Big Friday, which plays Goa trance techno with heavy surf overtones. Although it’s usually just an ad hoc online project, two or three times a year there’s a quorum of ShuffleTime employees in a city with an open-minded nightclub, and the band actually gets to play one of their hypnotic, whirling, sea-weedy live sets.

Gordon says his “Lesson Learned” is the basis for his coding philosophy, and it’s based on Thoreau’s commandment: “Simplify, simplify, simplify!”, which Gordon simplifies to just “Simplify!”.

Asked what was on his iPod, Gordon said he liked old novelty music, like Weird Al Yankovic and other stuff from Dr. Demento, ambient chill and Philip Glass for coding, and Lil Wayne when he’s waking up. His big brother Chip is also a ShuffleTime Guide.

A few random cards from Gordon...

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