“Ever, as now, do I go all a-grope amid the wide mysteriousness of things.” —Herman Melville, Pierre

Hi! I’m a data scientist, currently working at the car wash, yeah!

I’ve worked in tech for the past 15 years, and I’m now on VC-backed startup #7. I’ve been the founding data hire twice, and I have experience in all three of the main subdepartments of data: data engineering, analytics, and machine learning/AI.

I’d like to write for a living someday—it’s been my strongest skill since I was a kid. We’ll get there.

Writing

For proper essays, I’ve fully migrated the eight pieces that I wrote on Medium over nine years. One day I will improve that regrettable pace, but for now, my favorite piece of writing that I’ve ever done is a long essay called “Le Chéile.”

I’ve been dumping my thoughts on Twitter since 2010. They’re not all diamonds.¹ Microblogging really works for me, so for better or worse, some of my “serious” writing is actually embedded in tweet threads. See, for example, my thread after reading Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone. Sometimes I even bring the tweets into bigger essays, because that’s where I was working out my thoughts.

Thoreau wrote in his journals on February 8, 1841: “My Journal is that of me which would else spill over and run to waste, gleanings from the field which in action I reap. I must not live for it, but in it for the gods. As if it were not kept shut in my desk, but were as public a leaf as any in nature.” Thus, in this very egocentric fashion, I like to make my leaves public. Work in public, write in public, think in public!

Logging

I log movies on Letterboxd and books on Goodreads. I’ve started a separate section for this, Logging. As much as I like Letterboxd and Goodreads, I also like the simplicity of Steven Soderbergh’s annual lists. I’ll mimic that, continuing the theme of the static site.

Data

If you’re here for professional reasons, I’ll post some of my favorite data projects soon. I’ve been wanting to make an interactive version of my silly friend tracker for a while now, so a draft of that is up now.