Technical background and interests

As a former backend web developer with a degree in Germanic Studies, pursuing a career in technical writing seemed like a logical choice for a career change. When I heard that the project we had been working on at Gap Inc might be retired, I looked into the possibility of retraining myself for other internal technical positions. The senior manager of the GIS team recommended that I acquire Machine Learning skills for an open position on his team. After completing Andrew Ng’s Stanford Online Machine Learning course, the GIS team was dissolved.

When I studied in Germany, my area of focus was linguistics. As a student in Siegen, I worked part-time in the Germanic Studies department translating and copy editing for Professor Helmut Kreuzer for a few years. Years later, I would reflect on this experience after learning about the trend of treating docs as code. With my collaborative software development experience and liberal arts background, I felt well-equipped to take the plunge.

My favorite areas of IT are Linux system administration, networking, and database design. I started with Slackware, moved on to FreeBSD, and in 2009 started using Ubuntu Server LTS while migrating our web-based application at Gap Inc to Amazon AWS.

Networking has always fascinated me. When interviewing applicants for our technical writer positions at NXLog Ltd, my favorite networking question was, "Can you name the three elements that comprise a network socket?" In over two years of interviewing candidates, only one could answer it without any hints.

For years, the job I dreamed about most was designing database schemas and queries. After mastering SQL, I moved on to MongoDB about 10 years ago. More recently I have experimented with the MERN stack for some of my personal projects. For data analytics, I am currently using Raijin with Python pandas and seaborn.