I did math in college, had my first job in finance, went to law school, and moved into software / data in the mid-2010s. I believe in lifelong learning. I believe that the job offer is the start of the journey, not the end (cue Peter Norvig). I believe anxiety is freedom.
My capstone project at data science bootcamp involved building a model to run active selection on Lending Club loans. Lending Club buckets loans into risk grades. My hypothesis is it's possible to 'cherry pick' loans to outperform average returns; the model consistently achieved a 1-2% uplift to returns across the board. It turns out Theorem LP (YC 2014) does exactly this as a business. I joined Square post-Zipfian, and joined Theorem post-Square.
My capstone project for Berkeley's Java: Discovering its Power course was building a neural network predictive model from scratch. I later ported the repo to Clojure.
RC is like a writers' retreat for programmers. I spent time on WebAssembly (repos here and here), compilers and functional programming. I contributed to the open source Python HTTP client urrlib3. I wrote a blog about the experience. I returned for a mini-batch at the start of 2022; my post on the experience reached top 10 of Hacker News.
I love Bradfield, perhaps best known for their Teach Yourself CS guide. I completed the set of courses that make up the CS undergrad curriculum, particularly memorable were projects for compilers, databases and APIs. I've completed Cohort 3 of Bradfield's Computer Science Intensive program.
I did David Beazley’s SICP course at the end of 2022, my mind was blown on how much we covered in a week. I enjoyed the experience so much I signed up for the month-long Winter Project format where we implemented from scratch Raft and a compiler. I wrote about my SICP experience here.
ChatGPT is an absolute gift when I get into curious mode. I started keeping track of prompts and responses below.