Who am I
Hello! Thanks for checking out my page. First and foremost, I wanted to use this post to talk about why I’m starting this blog, and also to give some background about who I am. I’ll keep it brief.
I was born and raised in the Bay Area. Hopped around a few cities in the East Bay —Oakland, Walnut Creek, Alamo and Danville. I now live in beautiful San Francisco in the Alamo Square district.
I’m an avid cyclist, music, coffee and beer lover, and podcast listener. I’ve also been to lots of places and I love nightlife. I find that the best way to immerse yourself in another culture is to spend a few late nights out with the locals.
I made the move across the bay to SF in 2014. This city has everything to offer. Except, well, anything that’s remotely affordable. It’s an interesting thing really. People talk and talk about how expensive life here is and yet, continue to live here. I’m guilty of it, too. I think that just speaks volumes to this city’s splendor.
When I moved out here I had been working in the Finance industry as a consultant. Had to put my undergraduate degree in Accounting to use.
I spent about three years in the industry until I got burnt out from the constant travel. When I say constant travel, I mean constant travel. I got an exorbitant amount of airline and hotel points though — silver lining?
After my stint in public Accounting I then went on to work at a tech company where I did similar work. There were several differences between the two gigs, but two stood out to me as the most crucial — first, at the tech job I worked in SF and was able to walk to and from the office home. Second, the tech company was less than 1% the size of the first company where I worked. This was a huge change for me. I went from having little noticeable impact to leading a team and essentially a department. The new company was also in its early stages after going public so it was very rapidly and constantly changing. It was really exciting for me and an awesome learning experience. I spent a little under a year and a half at the smaller tech company.
I guess I felt something that a lot, if not all, people feel at one point or another in their career. That anxious, existential, probably over-dramatized feeling where you ask yourself ‘is this really what I’m supposed to be doing?’ It was hard for me to answer ‘yes’ to that question, so I made a change.
For the past 12 or so weeks of my life, I spent every day learning what terms like logistic regression; multicollinearity; munging; neural networks; and, my personal favorite; the Porter Stemming Algorithm, mean. For those who don’t know, these are all terms used in world of Data. Or, the science of data, I should say.
After spending a few months traveling and figuring out what I wanted to do with my life, I decided to take a three month Data Science bootcamp. This was an amazing decision for me. I have always been fascinated by the sheer amount of data companies produce, and how powerful and impactful — when harnessed correctly — data can be. And now I’ve got the skills to be able to help companies make powerful and impactful decisions using their data.
So, here I am. I’ll be using this as a platform to share projects, articles, and other random stuff. Hope you enjoy.
That’s it for now — See you soon.
