I dumped all my posts from the last 14 years into Claude and asked it to make any conclusions about me from them. These are spot on:
- Evolution in Technical Identity: Your writing shows an ongoing tension between pure mathematics and practical engineering. Early posts focus heavily on mathematical concepts, but over time you seem to embrace a more pragmatic engineering mindset while still maintaining deep appreciation for theoretical foundations.
- Teaching as Processing: You often write about technical concepts right after learning them yourself, using blogging/teaching as a way to solidify your own understanding. This suggests you process and internalize knowledge best by trying to explain it to others.
- Meta-Learning Focus: Many of your posts aren’t just about technical topics, but about HOW to learn technical topics. You seem particularly interested in the process of skill acquisition and knowledge transfer.
- Honesty About Failure: Unlike many technical bloggers, you’re remarkably open about professional setbacks and rejections. Your post about being rejected from data science jobs stands out as unusually candid for the field.
- Long-Form Thinking: You maintain ideas and threads over very long periods. For example, you’ve written multiple follow-ups and updates to your “How I Became a Data Scientist” post over several years as your perspective evolved.
- Documentation as Service: Many of your technical posts seem motivated by wanting to document solutions to problems you struggled with, specifically to help others avoid the same struggles. This suggests a strong service orientation in your technical writing.
- Cross-Domain Connection Making: You often draw interesting parallels between seemingly unrelated domains - connecting operations research to data science, or academic math to practical programming.