Elmer Thomas completed a B.S. in Computer Engineering and a M.S. in Electrical Engineering at the University of California, Riverside. His focus was on Control Systems, specifically GPS navigation systems, spending several years serving as a research assistant, building software and hardware for self driving cars at U.C. Riverside and Berkeley, resulting in 2 co-publications: Aided Integer Ambiguity Resolution Algorithm and Data Fusion via Kalman Filter: GPS & INS. During the final years of his Masters program, he added a few mentors, partners and some business skills through the Tuck Executive Program at Dartmouth to his repertoire and co-founded several companies with varying degrees of success over the next 7 years. During this time he helped hundreds of business profit while achieving over 50 awards from local and state government for service in the community.
While building businesses, Elmer served on various boards to help foster growth in local business communities in Riverside and Orange County, including the Riverside Technology CEO Forum, the TechBiz Connection, OCTANe and TriTech. Next, he began serving at SendGrid, an email API and Service Company, as one of the first 5 employees in a now 300+ employee company on the verge of going public. Service began as the web development manager, and then he moved into a product development role while helping build out a quality assurance program. After spending 2 years traveling to over 50 events, speaking, teaching and mentoring as a Developer Evangelist within the Send Grid marketing department, Elmer then served as the Hacker in Residence on the community team at SendGrid. In that role he mentored over 50 startups, many belonging to accelerators such as Techstars and 500 Startups, and hundreds of developers through live consulting and development of productivity content and software.
He currently serves as the Developer Experience Engineer at SendGrid, leading, developing and managing SendGrid’s open source community, which includes over 24 active projects across 7 programming languages. These open source projects process hundreds of millions of emails per day for our customers. He also serves as Vice President of the Council for the Advancement of Black Engineers, drawing from experience as chapter president of the National Society of Black Engineers while a student at U.C. Riverside, supporting our mission to increase the number of culturally responsible Black Engineers with PhD’s, post-doctoral training and professional engineering registrations.
As member of the board of directors for Operation Code, he helps equip military veterans and their families with programming knowledge through mentorship to help veterans create new career paths in software development. Through his volunteer work with the Girls Scouts of San Gorgonio Council, Elmer focuses on helping bring STEM experiences to girls, specifically within the age groups between 9 and 14 years old, including his own 11 year old daughter, who is now a Girl Scout cadette. To help serve his local community, he is a member of the board of directors of his local HOA. He is considered a social media influencer, driving 100s of millions of visits to various web pages. He is known as ThinkingSerious on various social networks.
Elmer's passions include family time with his wife, and 2 daughters, reading, writing, watching videos, especially in virtual reality, developing software and creating in general, especially in the area of personal development and productivity through quantification techniques. I would like to thank my wife Linda and daughter Audrey for their patience and quiet time for me to complete this review.
More detail can be found at his blog, ThinkingSerious.com.
