Jul 27 2008
About
About me? Well, I’m a socially conscious geek who happens to be currently working for Google. Google is pretty awesome. The only downside is trying to keep track of what I can and can’t tell people. It’s easier to just say I can’t talk about X than keep track of what is safe to talk about. My previous job was as a dev on a Repo trading system for Merrill Lynch. That was fun but no where near as much as being here.
The greater geek in me is a programmer, interested in theory but focused (and better at) practical applications. I mainly code in Java and enjoy dabbling with other languages. Right now that means D and Erlang largely for how they approach concurrency. I’d like to get into machine learning, recommender systems, distributed computing and language processing. We’ll see how far I get. 
The lesser geek in me is a data head interested in politics, social issues, interactions between cultures and language, learning new languages and the economic effects of various policies. Right now I have studied bits of Spanish, Latin and Punjabi and can recognize each of them. I’ve been told my handwriting in Punjabi is pretty good. Unfortunately my grammar and vocabulary both suck! I have to work on that too.
The socially conscious part of me follows news about climate change and microfinance. I also try to cook and read up on ways to help developing countries. I make loans on kiva.org (my profile) and donations via Millennium Promise. Both are great organizations and I encourage everyone to check them out.
Everything on this blog is just a brain dump of mine and doesn’t reflect any positions of my employer (unless specifically attributed).