Shawn was born and raised in the heart of the Bay area, a breeding pool of technology and innovation. He first started programming at the age of 13, trying to learn how to hack his PlayStation Portable so that he could play games for free. Through the PSP hacking community, he learned about the vast potential surrounding computers, programming, and the internet.

Before joining Parity Technologies as Lead Developer, he was working at Microsoft on Microsoft Azure. At his time at Parity, he contributed to the launch of Polkadot and continued to work on the development of the Polkadot SDK. He now works independently as a Polkadot Fellow, contributing to and creating open source software for the decentralized web.