Oh yeah, I have a blog...

How embarassing, I haven’t posted for two years! The silliest thing about this all is that I have several draft posts that were almost done that I somehow put off polishing and publishing them. I’ll have to dust them off and see if any are still relevant… (Topics varying from Ruby, testing, Clojure, machine learning, and conference reports.)

I have been quite busy these past two years so I can somewhat blame that for the lack of blog posts (but not really). So whats new? I’ve been adjusting to being a new dad (this past July 4th, yay!!), training and competing in my first triathlons, programming clojure, and (re)learing math and machine learning. I’ll expand on the last two since this is a tech blog. :)

Shortly after my last blog post, in 2009, I started investigating Clojure. I found it to be a very well thought-out language with some powerful ideas and concepts ingrained in it (e.g. laziness, immutability, STM, and it’s overall approach to state). I eventually got some people on board at work with it (#protip: instigating a SICP study group is a good first step in doing this). After some prototypes in early 2010 we decided that it was a good fit for some parts of our new infrastructure. I won’t go into the details now, but the short story is that we are very pleased with it.

One of my favorite projects with Clojure has been to automate the building of all of our predictive models in the cloud (via the fantastic pallet and jclouds projects). Being able to fire up X spot instances and issue commands to them all from the comfort of your REPL is really useful and.. well, fun to do. :)

My current job also involves a fair amount of machine learning so for the past two years I’ve been furiously studying all the math and ML algorithms that I learned (ostensibly at least) in school. I ended up retaking a Probability course at the University of Utah and did some online courses, such as Gilbert Strang’s fantastic Linear Algebra course, and Andrew Ng’s Machine Learning course (still in progress actually). With my stronger foundation it has been fulfilling to be able to read papers and apply the ideas to problems at work and competitions. While I’m still primarily an engineer, I’ve really enjoyed the area of machine learning and hope to continue working in it in some way.

So, that is what I’ve been up to for the past couple years. I’ll try hard not to allow such a long writing hiatus to happen in the future.