I had written code before. Growing up, I moved a turtle around in Logo. In college, I read Kernighan and Ritchie to generate prime numbers. 2014 was the year I started writing code continuously, and I haven’t stopped since.
It started with a discounted MacBook Pro, Codecademy and Peter Norvig’s Design of Computer Programs. I attended a Python meetup in Berlin where a core contributor spoke about the latest release of scikit-learn. I didn’t understand any of it, but I left thinking I could make the material more accessible to beginners.
I started the meetup group Kaggle Berlin to put the idea into practice. The format was simple: start with the Titanic dataset, train the simplest Random Forest model that beats the baseline, then progressively add complexity.
It worked well enough that it became a workshop at PyCon UK later that year.
I moved to San Francisco in 2015 for a data science bootcamp, in the heyday of bootcamps being the side door into tech. For a while I was convinced I didn’t belong, not next to CS graduates who had been building websites since middle school. So I took the side door to the side door by applying for a ‘data scientist’ role, then defined as someone who is better at statistics than any software engineer and better at software engineering than any statistician.
Post-bootcamp I joined the risk team at Square. Fraud detection at a payments company is as textbook applied machine learning as it gets. What struck me about Square wasn’t the work, it was the place. Like Apple, the product cuts across both hardware and software. You could feel the ambition in the office itself. Artistic sketches of Square readers lined the walls, the kind of detail that comes from thinking deeply about what you make.
When I heard this at onboarding, I knew I had found a home:
Your job is to absorb as much complexity as you can, and pass the simplicity through.
I loved that the company was focused on democratizing access to small sellers. I was touched by the Square Dreams video series, which highlighted underserved sellers like Yassin Falafel. I teared up at the end. He and his family stood in front of their home, the American flag above them, the subtitle read: because this country is for everybody.
I confess, I loved the frills. I loved starting the day with custom-made smoothies. I loved how the cafeteria served sushi and pasta every day, steak and lobster on special days. I loved how Wise Sons had a sandwich shop on site, and how Boba Guys would do a pop-up every week. I felt like I’d made it. It felt like it would last forever.
While at Square I attended a deep learning conference at Stanford, with speakers including Andrew Ng, Andrej Karpathy and John Schulman. I didn’t do much with it, though I did lead a deep learning workshop at Square not long after.
I was in the right place. Whether I was paying attention is another question. I passed by Sam Altman once outside Stonemill Matcha on Valencia St on the way to 16th St Mission BART. I remember talking to Daniela Amodei when Stripe was interested in hiring me, and I left the conversation thinking “that’s the most interesting recruiter I’ve ever met”.