Hi, I’m Matt.

I’m a Data Scientist and Physicist writing about projects, tools, professional development, industry practices, and the industry at large.

What to expect

I’m a Data Scientist who occasionally dabbles in some light software engineering. I started off as a physicist working with computational/statistical tools for nuclear physics and have been working in tech for a few years now. What that means is that I’ve made that academia-to-industry transition and learned many lessons along the way. Some of this writing will be what my past self wished I knew.

I like writing tools I want to use, but may not exist. Or may not be convenient. That’s why I wrote the MaxPro tool, I was frustrated with having to call R in a subprocess and I wanted to make things fast and not reliant on flaky interprocess communication via parsing stdout or writing to disk. I wrote it in Rust because I mostly write things in Python and I wanted to address Ousterhout’s Dichotomy. Some of my writing will be on my own software tools, projects, and software development. It might be focused on a tool, it might be focused on development practices.

I also have things I want to explore that don’t fit neatly into the scope of my day job. That’s not only building a open-source package, it could also mean exploring an operations research problem by building a hotel booking system and seeing how optimal I can make it. It could be part of a hobby interest I have in property-based testing and fuzzing software to find edge cases and guard against them (and finally getting to use hegel). It could be adapting the incredible TigerBeetle style guide (TigerStyle) for a language or project where static allocation of memory on startup isn’t a relevant concern. It’d be great to write about all these things.

A post may also just be a useful collection of links, gists, cheatsheets, or other resources that continue to be useful to me and I’d like a place to put them that I own.

Because I spend my working life in tech, I have things I’ve learned about working in teams with diverse backgrounds, communicating ideas more effectively. I also want to grow and advance my career (who doesn’t) and sometimes there’s something to say there, a lesson learned, or something that would have been helpful to know sooner. If any of that can help anyone else on their journey, I’d like to pay it forward.

I will also have an occasional rant about the right way to do things. Some of these ideas might even be correct. Don’t count on it.

What not to expect

Nothing I write here is the opinion of my employer and nothing should be interpreted as defining the practices within my employer. Nothing I write here is privileged, confidential, or otherwise intellectual property of anyone but myself in my personal capacity.

No AI is used in writing these posts, editing them, or giving feedback. Writing is a place where I get to learn what I think as much as you do by reading it, so the only thing using AI would do is dilute that practice.d

This is also not a personal blog: you won’t find discussions of my favorite Wikipedia articles, a recent hike, or anything like that. I’m keeping this focused on tech and its greater orbit. You probably don’t want to read about my most recent 5k time anyway.

These blog posts are not advertising for my team, for my company, or for future employment. That being said, if you’re reading this and thinking “we should hire this guy”, my LinkedIn is on the sidebar. Worst case, we make a connection and I get to learn about the cool stuff you’re working on.

Who might find this useful

The graduate student looking to break into industry

I was there not too long ago: the academic who knew that academia wasn’t their future. Sure, I’d written Python, but it was all in an academic context. There were no pull requests, no shared repos, no code review. If something was on my GitHub, that was great, but most research code never saw the light of day. It certainly never saw ruff or flake8. It definitely never saw a unit test.

This user will find information I wish I had known about what to learn to be successful technically as well as how to begin to think about a career where there are no rules, hiring committees, or fellowships.

The early career IC

Maybe you’re in tech, but you’re new at it. Maybe you’ve got questions about how to get to that next level. Great! I have those questions too and maybe my answers can help you find yours.

This user will find my own thoughts and (hopefully) useful links and resources that have shaped my thinking.

The single-post reader

Maybe I’ll write something good someday. Maybe someone will post it on HN or Lobste.rs. I hope those users get something great out and share this post, but also reach out somewhere and tell me their thoughts. Maybe I’m completely wrong about something and you’d like to correct me. Maybe I was right about something and it helped.

This user would rock to have.

Myself

This is about avoiding the unexamined career. By taking some time to reflect, share, and elucidate, I hope to come back and either think wow that was a great insight I had or to say wow I've learned a lot since I wrote that. Maybe I’ll at least luck out and think wow what a great collection of useful information I put together.