Blog Post #1

Hello, my name is Carlos and this is my first blog post for CS467. I’ve never used WordPress before but have been quite impressed so far, I may just need to continue using it after this class. I figured I’d structure this blog post by quickly touching on two of the suggested topics.

Current job

A bit of backstory to get to where I am now. I majored in Finance in my first undergrad program. By the end of my time I realized I really enjoyed math and CS and took mostly classes in those area my last year and a half. My first job out of school was at an insurance company where I was in a data science role. I spent my time developing pricing models, doing devops on ML models, and writing software to evaluate different model types. While I enjoyed the split between math and programming I realized what I really enjoyed was the software engineering aspects of things. At the time I was half way through a Masters in Analytics from Georgia Tech and decided to switch to this post bacc program and double down on CS. About a year into the program a friend encouraged me to apply to the company he was working at and I was lucky enough to land the job. I’ve been at that company for ~2 years now and during that time I’ve been fortunate enough to be promoted to senior engineer. The company is a fintech company and my team focuses on building out data products used externally. I’ve learned a lot during my time and the magic of being a software engineer hasn’t worn off. While work is still work, most days I can say that I enjoy it. The thing about software is that there’s always so much to learn, it’s very exciting to always be gaining expertise and then applying what you’ve learned to solve increasingly difficult problems.

Hobbies

The main hobbies I’ve been cultivating recently are piano, cooking and backpacking. A few notes about each:

• Piano – I’ve only been playing for about a year but it’s been quite a fun challenge to re-learn how to read music and try and figure out how to play with both hands at once.
• Cooking – It’s like art but you can eat it when you’re done! I’m pretty bad at following recipes but have gained a decent intuitive sense for how to combine flavors which makes it very fun. I mainly find myself cooking Mexican and Thai food, always with a generous amount of spice.
• Backpacking – It’s very relaxing to get off the grid in the outdoors. There’s still a lot of adventure left in this world and the way I like to experience it is going on longer backcountry trips. Thankfully California has a lot of beautiful areas to explore.