My name is Elharith Elrufaie, I was born in 1980 (pretty young, eh?), I lived most of my life in the United Arab Emirates. I moved to the United States in the last day of 2002 when I was accepted to California State University @ San Bernardino to do my MS degree in Computer Science. In the 15 months I spent in graduate school I worked as Graduate Teaching Assistant for the C++ and Web Prgramming classes. I worked for a professor, namely Dr David Turner as a Research Assistant in his Web Services research group. In my opinion, working in this research group was the greatest value for me. For example, it allowed me to publish two research papers in conference transactions, I learned how to think and solve a problem! and most importantly I learned how to stay in lab all day night! I received my MS degree in June 2004.

I moved from San Bernardino CA to San Francisco when I got an offer from CNET Networks in May 2004. So currently I live in San Francisco, one of the most astonishing cities. The weather is always partly cloudy, cool and breezy which makes it (in my opinion!) fantastic place for living!

In weekends and sparetime I enjoy reading. I like to read stories in classical Arabic. I also write from time to time, whenever the mind is relaxed enough! I enjoy drinking coffee! My favorite moment when I'm in cafe holding a book in my left and a cup of coffee in my right hand! By the way, did I mention that I'm fan of Peets Coffee ?!

I like to live in silence, I do not like noise! Therefore, I enjoy classical soft music. For Arabic speaking singers, my top are Abdel Karim Alkabli, Zedan Ibrahim, Abdel Halim Hafiz, Umm Kalthoum and Fayrouz. Among English speakers, the king of pop- Michael Jackson and Celine Dion are my favorites.

I work for CNET Networks as Software Engineer. I'm in the Site Engineering team of the Shopping Services & Advice (SSA) division. We're  responsible of the building web applications for CNET.com, CNET and ZDNET Reviews websites.  One of the recent projects I worked on and really enjoyed was the redesign the Product Category Listings.  This allow uses to filter their product search based on different parameters, such as price, manufacturer, etc. The application is smart enough to tell you how many products would match your filter criteria, so that you would not end up having zero products. If you're interested, the tech-lead of this project wrote interesting article in Lucene blog about the underlying technologies and design details, click here to check it out. 

I think CNET is a great company to work for! I really enjoy it.. lots of challenge, cool projects, opportunity to work and interact with very smart people and lots fun too! Click here to check out some of our parties pictures.