Hello World!

Introduction (hello, world)

I’m Aaron. A while ago, I graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in Cognitive Science, and started work as a software engineer doing search analytics at A9 in Palo Alto. I’m interested in machine learning and in particular in the directions that Bayesian nonparametrics and work on stochastic/probabilistic programming are going. When I’m not focused on technical issues, I like eating, reading (vegetarian/vegan) food blogs, and neglecting my piano.

Motivation

I’m starting the blog because I can’t stand to have all my coding be at work. This practice causes lots of obvious frustrations: * I conflate my frustration with work with my frustration with programming, and am starting to lose sight of the fun in playing with code * I don’t get to talk about any of my projects with the outside world. Because A9 doesn’t have a public facing service, many people think it’s either dead, or one of the projects that Bezos doesn’t have the heart to kill. This means that if I don’t have something other than A9 to which I can tie my professional/technical name and reputation, I may be seen as a poor engineer at a useless, irrelevant company. * My work projects aren’t playful. Because our data is so big, many fun things become impractical. Because our schedule is so tight, there’s relatively little room for exploration (or at least not as much as I’d like).
* My projects don’t help me learn. I want to learn new tools and new languages. I want to learn new math and new tricks.

Goals

• I want this blog to be a place where I post things that I’ve done, and invite other people to comment, question, share, improve, discuss, etc. This should not be a place where I just comment on things other people have said, rant, or just post links.
• I want most of my projects to find a way to do something cool with data.
• I don’t require all of my contributions to be original. In fact, I think there’s a lot I could learn from implementing classic stuff that other people have pioneered; other people could also benefit from seeing a slowed-down tutorial on how some of the fancy things I want to learn about work.
• I’d like to have at least some of my posts be teaching/tutorial posts. This may be a presumptuous goal; I’m a newcomer to a lot of the things I’m interested in, but I’ve been told alternatively that the best way to learn something is to a) implement it from scratch or b) teach it. For somethings, I hope to do both