2024
Survived painful, herniated disc and went through successful surgery
Got back to lifting weights after 5 month break due to a herniated disc
Down to the fourth belt hole on a belt I couldn’t wear a year ago
Saw huge growth and adoption of feature store platform at Varo
Landed amazing job at Spotify
Spoke at fintech_devcon, my tech first conference in 5 years
Saw my first total eclipse
Recorded two interesting interviews on AI-assisted software development
Back to blogging at tdhopper.com a bit
Redesigned tdhopper.com with Hugo and Decap CMS
2023
Had 4th kid and watched them all thrive (this was most of my year…)
285 lbs bench press, 425 lbs deadlift, 405 lbs squat
Most impactful year of work yet
Started handbook on Python developer tooling (more soon, hopefully)
2022
Had 3rd kid and kept them all alive
Moved with three small children
Entered my first strongman competition (with a 10 day old baby)
Lead integration of Tecton’s feature store for my team (and learned a ton on the way)
2021
Survived Covid-19 in January
Took over massive new responsibilities on my team after the departure of our infrastructure engineers
Accepted new job as a staff software engineer
Helped underpaid colleague get a new job w/ a big raise
Deadlifted 405 lbs
2020
Survived pandemic
Left a disappointing job and found a great new one
Completed challenging 1st year of 2nd child
Recruited my former coworker Brenton to work with me
Built a new website for my resume (with automatically generated PDF version!)
Learned some new things (Go, Python dashboarding, xarray library, weather forecast data)
2019
Had a second son
Moved my team completely off Python 2
Set a new record for length of time at a company
Bench pressed 235 and deadlifted 375
Took a long talked about trip to Yellowstone with my dad
2018
Made photos.tdhopper.com
Spoke at Scipy, BSides Ashville, Pydata DC, Triangle Juypter Day, and the Southern Data Science Conference
Bench-pressed 200 lbs and deadlifted 300 lbs for the first time
Moved my static sites from AWS to Netlify
Presented at 6 of my teams bi-weekly knowledge shares
Sold my team on Pytest
Learned a bunch about malware
Learned more about network communications
Started instagram.com/doyouplayball
Published A Subjective and Anecdotal FAQ on Becoming a Data Scientist
Bought my first house
2017
Made pythonplot.com
First baby
Better understood Linux user account model
Wrote Some Reflections on Being Turned Down for a Lot of Data Science Jobs
Second time on Adversarial Learning
Use Ansible effectively
Two trips to Grayson Highlands State Park in Virginia