Hélène received her Elementary and Middle School diplomas from the International School of the Peninsula in Palo Alto, California where she studied French and Spanish while spending way too much time telneting to MUDs and reading USENET posts. During her time there, she discovered hardware while helping her father overclock their 486 to 90Mhz (~1994) and got into a lot of trouble for corrupting that machine's Windows '95 registry while "hunting around for information" (~1995). Upon deciding that Windows '98 was atrocious and not worth the upgrade, she discovered Linux (~1999).

Hélène's High School diploma comes from Gunn High School. It is at the beginning of her stay there that she finally got around to making her first Linux install after receiving her own box and baptizing it Zeddicus (2000). Her first distro was SuSE but she quickly moved on to Slackware, which Zeddicus runs to this day. Hélène joined the Gunn Robotics Team in her second year at Gunn and acted as webmaster, systems administrator and finally as team leader during her busy three years with the team.