Blake is from West Jordan, Utah. He served an LDS mission to Veracruz, Mexico from 2000-2002. He has been a teacher’s assistant for programming, data structures, and algorithm analysis. He had an internship with Symantec writing enhancements to existing security software from 2004-2005. He served as Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) chapter vice president and president from 2004-2006. He was BYU ACM programming champion and took 8th place at the ACM regional programming competition. He received the Wells Fargo Dependent Scholarship for two years. He earned a full tuition scholarship to BYU, and graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science in April 2006. Blake joined the research group in January 2006, and has worked on the verification problem as well as the retail laboratory project. He defended his Master’s Thesis in March 2010 at BYU.