Five Neat Things About Cheston
Cheston Lee is one of our Engineering Managers at Casper. He joined the team in February, 2017, after working as a software engineer on the Hillary Clinton campaign for over a year. His specialties are JavaScript and tricking his two cats into not waking him up in the morning.
Hometown:
Cheston grew up in Saratoga Springs, a small city outside of Albany, New York. Despite New Yorkers’ impression of anything in upstate New York as a vast wilderness punctuated by the occasional hazelnut farm servicing their local coffee shop, Cheston’s town had a fair amount of personality:
“Saratoga Springs is a horse town,” he says. “It lives and breathes the summer racing season.” Since 1863, it’s been the site of major summer races that draw tourists into the area.
How he started coding:
Despite this pastoral setting, Cheston was drawn to computers from a young age. “I learned how to code on my family’s computer,” he says, “mostly teaching myself from what I found on blogs.” The primary goal? Coercing early Star Wars computer games to run, of course.
While his parents initially encouraged him to spend time away from the computer (say, riding a mare through idyllic pastures?), he eventually found himself drawn to the few computer science classes available in his small high school, which ultimately led him to major in the subject at Rochester Technical Institute and subsequently earn a job at an early stage startup in San Francisco.
Best Adventure
Despite the seemingly geeky past-times (and the Imperial Insignia tattoo on his arm), Cheston isn’t strictly limited to indoor activities. On the contrary, when he first became interested in working for Casper, he was quite difficult to track down for interviews as he was busy riding a motorcycle through the jungles of Vietnam.
The most adrenaline-spiking event on the trip? Not storms raging in a mountainous landscape, as you might guess, although these occurred as well.
“It was not the most dangerous thing that happened on the trip,” he says, “but it was by far the most terrifying,” Cheston says of the chicken being dragged onto a bus by an old woman.
It was in full protest as the woman flagged down the bus from the side of the road. The bus suddenly stopped short ahead of Cheston, nearly causing an accident.
Dream project:
When Cheston quit his job and moved across the country to work on the Hillary campaign, it was because he had a dream about it, so… the idea of a dream project is pretty intense. Still, Cheston admits that there is some pretty exciting stuff going on at Casper;
“There are a lot of interesting challenges at a young startup and we have a lot to chew on,” he says. “I think moving a lot of the front end code to React & Redux is quite exciting for us.” He’s particularly interested in rendering static content at build time and improving web performance.
Bedtime Ritual:
Working at a sleep company, bedtime rituals are obviously very important to us. For Cheston, the pre-zzz routine involves dark chocolate and a glass of milk (or, ahem, scotch). His love of dark chocolate began while he was working at his first job at genius.com in San Francisco, where his boss would hand it out in the afternoon.
If you’re wondering what types of snacks we hand out here at the Casper HQ, or, having read this, want to hang out with Cheston all the time, you can check out our jobs board here. We’re always looking for great engineers to join the team and help make the world sleepier one dream at at a time.
