Sam taught himself to program Perl while working at WestEd, a non-profit organization. Born and raised in Oakland, CA, Sam spent 13 years in the Oakland Public Schools before getting a BA in Rhetoric from Berkeley. In his spare time he likes to play guitar, camp, and play with his pet pit-bull.

Sam has expert knowledge of the Ruby on Rails framework, AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) interfaces, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), Perl, and MySQL. He follows Test and Behavior Driven Development practices and set up and maintains Beezwax's Continuous Integration System.