My Life

 I'm no history buff. I took European history in high school and got really bad grades. I haven't really studied history since I graduated high school. So take this as a layperson's understanding of European history. I know that history repeats. I know what we're seeing now in the USA has happened before in other countries, many times throughout history--both recorded history and lost history. I see the way people talk about Hitler and Nazis and I feel that it is problematic specifically for the reason that Hitler specifically and by extension the Nazi party are often set up on a pedestal of pure, unadulterated  evil. The reason I see this as problematic is because it then becomes illogical to compare any contemporary person with them, because it is extremely rare to find an individual (and rarer still to find a group of people) who embody pure evil. So as strange as it may seem, I believe it is more helpful to humanize them--to the end of understanding how such horrors...

 I was raised religious. In my religion, it is customary for young people (roughly teenage years) to receive a special blessing which is given by a patriarch in the community and typed up and presented as a letter for the recipient to keep. In the one I received as a teenager, one of the lines it included was "stand for what is right even if it means standing alone". This is a message which I have taken to heart since that time. I am a relatively stubborn person and I have a strong sense of what I believe to be right and what I believe to be wrong. And I feel very strongly about standing up for what I believe to be right and denouncing the things that I believe to be wrong.  I understand that there are many reasons people had in '16, '20, and just this year to vote for Trump. I know some people reveled in the way he insults certain groups of people--the bullying he openly and unashamedly engages in. I know that many people are largely unaware of the bullying he does, ...

 Two weeks ago I made the decision to leave my current job and take an offer for a new job. Yesterday was my last day at Snap Finance. The week after next I'll start my new job at Awardco. It was far from an easy decision to make. I labored over it even before I got the job offer, but was anticipating it since they'd asked for references. I knew that my boss would try to keep me at Snap since that's the impression he's given the 5 years I've been there. He's a great boss and he's been very open about how much he appreciates my work.  I have to say, I have learned a lot at Snap. When I started all I knew about machine learning was from the statistics class I took as an undergrad in college and the skills I had learned through the Internet. My first year at Snap I lacked any kind of confidence. I was very unsure of myself and I had very few skills to draw upon. Since then I've learned a lot about Python, SQL, Kubernetes, cloud computing, and a host of rela...