About me

Hi, my name is Grady Laksmono. I was born in the second largest city in Indonesia, Surabaya in 1988. I went to school in Indonesia for 15 years, then I attended high school in the United States in 2003. Before I came to the United States, I was one of those who weren’t that much interested with education. So I never study for any of them, and made sure that I pass them. Instead, I spent most of my time with my little Pentium 2 PC to play computer games, played around with the operating system and many computer applications. What started as a game soon become an interest that defines the person who I am today, and strive to be in the future.

I started to take my education seriously when I was in high school. It was also the first time that I was introduced with the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Macromedia Flash (now is Adobe). I don’t remember what grade that I got for those classes, but I started to use them extensively to develop my first website for a multi-player game team and an internet radio station, which eventually lead me to my first pay-check! I was referred by my teacher to the high school Principal to become a webmaster for the whole school! And the cool part, I work at home with my own schedule This was the first time I learned on how to work with a client. I graduated from high school in 2006 with honorable-mention, a college preparatory diploma, and a community service award.

Soon thereafter, I attended California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA) majoring in Computer Science. I was working part-time throughout my undergraduate education, mainly as a web programmer at the College of Engineering, Computer Science, and Technology. My responsibility was to develop, design, and maintain the website of the college, and all of the departments that fall under the engineering college, which includes the computer science, electrical and computer engineering, mechanical engineering, and civil engineering. During my undergraduate study, I took some graduate courses that introduced me with the field of research. I completed my undergraduate study in 3 years and graduated in 2009 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science.

I was debating whether I should be working for a couple of years before pursuing a graduate study. But I was left with too much of curiosity in the field. So I decided to pursue a graduate degree in Computer Science at University of Southern California (USC). Obviously, I was also debating whether I should go to USC or UCLA (also read the UCLA-USC rivalry), but I have to admit that the faculty at USC is much easier to approach! I’m coming to USC with the mind-set to join a research lab. I researched the laboratories at USC, and I found that Information Laboratory (InfoLab) is working on many interesting projects. I was hired at the end of my first semester. Throughout my stay at InfoLab, I had been working with many awesome projects and research. It was the first time, I experienced working with very large dataset that I had to manage to visualize without throwing an “OutOfMemory” exception.

I’m now a Software Engineer at Zynga and a Co-Founder / CTO of trueRSVP. Aside of my academic and career life, I like photography, playing badminton and many other sports (soccer, basketball, swimming), and work with graphics (photoshop, web design, 3D games, animation). I utilize Autodesk Maya to create a 3D model and animation, Adobe Photoshop for bitmap manipulation, Audacity for audio editing, and Adobe Flash for 2D animation. I also like to read interesting articles, blogs, and books.