Hello! My name is Rick Deininger and I am the newest member of the technical support team at Diffbot.
I began working with computers when I was very little. However, as I grew up, I had less access to computers so I was not able to pursue those interests as much. After graduating high school, I attended several schools for widely-varied fields such as Systems Administration, Computer Engineering, and Technical Writing. Unfortunately, various circumstances prevented me from completing a degree.
Eventually, I suffered a serious illness that forced me to take some time off from pursuing an education and career. During this time, I operated online businesses, and built small websites and scripts to support them. None of these businesses were ever a big success, but in the course of developing them, I did a lot of web scraping and learned several languages and technologies including Ruby, Python, JS, PHP, Selenium, and various kinds of web servers and databases.
A few years ago I had an opportunity to go back to school for a couple of years, and I did so with the hope that it would allow me to break back into the IT field. I attended De Anza College and completed 3 AA degrees simultaneously, including one in Network Administration and another in Information Security. During this time, I had also studied to get my AWS Solutions Architect certification, which I completed a few months after graduating.
I had never heard of Diffbot before finding the posting for this role online. What first attracted me to the company was its focus on web scraping, a subject that has at times been both my “bread and butter” and a bit of a hobby. However, as I have gained knowledge about the company and its product offerings, I have developed an increasing interest in the Diffbot Knowledge Graph, which seems sure to one day be a cornerstone of the IT industry. My mind is boggled by the sheer amount of data that Diffbot has mined through machine learning and natural language processing, and I can’t wait to see all the ways that other businesses are utilizing this data and this service to enhance their own product offerings.
I will be remotely supporting Diffbot’s products and APIs for their various customers. I have developed strong written communication and troubleshooting skills over the years, and I hope to bring these skills to bear to provide a high level of support to Diffbot’s customers.
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