Getting to Know Tim Hopper with Brenton Mallen

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Summary

In this special episode of Into the Hopper, the tables are turned as my friend and former colleague Brenton Mallen interviews me. We worked together at two different companies over the years, and Brenton realized that despite knowing me for over a decade, he didn’t really know the full Tim Hopper story.

We cover a lot of ground: growing up in southern West Virginia, my winding educational path through physics, computer science, and math, my time working at a children’s home in Tennessee, two PhD programs I started but didn’t finish, how I stumbled into data science through Twitter and grad school, meeting my wife Maggie, becoming a parent to four kids, hobbies like woodworking, photography, and knitting, and our recent move to Indiana to be closer to family. We also discuss the impact of AI on education and what it means for raising kids in this rapidly changing world.

Transcript

Brenton: So we don’t waste it—take one! Hi, welcome to Into the Hopper. I’m Brenton Mallen, and I’m here with my special guest, Tim Hopper. Thanks for having me.

Tim: Thanks for having me.

Brenton: Well, you’re welcome. How’d I get here?

Tim: Beats me. I don’t know how we got here. Actually, maybe we’ll talk about that. What are we doing today?

Brenton: For context, I had messaged you—I don’t even remember, it’s been a while now—asking when someone was going to interview you for your podcast. And I guess I volunteered by asking that question.

Tim: Very good.

Brenton: As we started talking about doing this and I wrote down some stuff to talk about, I realized a couple of things. One, I’ve just been doing a lot of thinking about friendship and what it means to be a friend and what it means to have a friend. We throw that term around quite a bit. I’ve been trying to realize what relationships I have that are friends, what that means, and can I make those relationships and connections a bit deeper. I’ve known you, I don’t know, 11 years now? Ten? Over a decade.

Tim: Just over 10, because we started working together in October of 2015.

Brenton: Right. Was that PyData where we met?

Tim: We were already working together for a few weeks, and then we went to PyData.

Brenton: I think I met you for the first time in person at PyData, yeah, definitely.

Tim: In New York.

Brenton: PyData 2015.

Tim: At Capital One or no—I don’t know—the World Trade Center.

Brenton: I realized I’ve quote-unquote “known” you for over a decade, but we talk decently regularly and I don’t know the Tim Hopper. So I thought at the very least we can have a conversation, I could get to know you a little bit better, and you can get a podcast episode out of it. If not, at least we’ll have a conversation.

Tim: Everyone will know the real Tim Hopper after this.

Brenton: We’ll see—could be good, could be bad. Who knows? But then again, your data’s out there already.

Tim: Usually it’s selectively shared, but today whatever you ask, I’m obligated to answer.

Brenton: I will make note of that. I just wanted to give you an opportunity to tell your story, coming from rural West Virginia to the big Kardashian machine of data science you’ve become.

Tim: Maybe we should explain first—we worked together at two different companies, actually, from 2015 to 2017 and then 2020 during early COVID until ‘21, right?

Brenton: I think so. Something like that. My memory is not what it used to be.

Tim: It’s all right. I’m pretty sure I’m right about that.

Brenton: As you look at a resume. But yeah, so let’s start there, I guess, at the very beginning. You grew up in West Virginia, right?

Growing Up in West Virginia

Tim: I did, yeah. I was born and raised in southern West Virginia, about as far south as you can be. My dad is a family practice doctor, and he had moved there after medical school to work in family practice. I lived in the same house my whole childhood. My parents moved back to North Carolina—where they lived previously—in 2007 when I was a senior in college, but my whole childhood was West Virginia.

Brenton: Did you move from West Virginia to North Carolina when you were at school?

Tim: To give the short story: I grew up in West Virginia, went to college in western Pennsylvania, then lived in Tennessee for a year, Virginia for a year, North Carolina for 15 years, and as of two weeks ago, I live in Indiana.

Brenton: So what was West Virginia like?

Tim: It was great. My mom and I were just talking about this the other day. She said when we were younger, people would say, “Oh, you shouldn’t raise your kids there. You need them in a place where there’s opportunity and different things.”

I’m sure I had some discontentment with various things as a kid, but I really have no complaints about growing up in West Virginia. I tell people that it’s only been in the last 10 years or so that I’ve started to tell people I grew up in rural West Virginia, because the town I grew up in was 6,000 people—I think it’s the 13th biggest town in West Virginia. We had Walmart. It wasn’t rural. We were right off the interstate—the town is Princeton, right off I-77—so we had interstate amenities. They have Starbucks there now.

But West Virginia gets real rural real fast. In comparison, I didn’t grow up in the hollers, way off the beaten path. It’s stunningly beautiful. It just has been snowing here in Indiana, and I’ve realized I was very spoiled growing up in a valley where you could just sled wherever. My eight-year-old wanted to sled, so we had to drive somewhere to find a hill, which is a new experience for me.

I think it was a very safe place to grow up. People were very nice and welcoming. I think I had sufficient opportunities. I didn’t have the opportunities that a lot of kids have in bigger areas, but I didn’t have real complaints. I was satisfied with my education. I’m very glad I grew up there.

Brenton: You were an only child?

Tim: No, I’m the youngest of four. I have three older sisters.

Brenton: Did I know that?

Tim: I don’t know.

Brenton: I feel like we’ve talked more about Maggie’s siblings.

Tim: Maggie has four sisters. I have three. So we have a lot of aunties in our family, as I like to say.

Brenton: What was that like? For context, I’m the middle of three boys, which I imagine is just really different.

Tim: Honestly, in going to college, I made a lot of really good male friends. I had good friends growing up, but in college I made friends that just became like brothers to me—and they’re still my friends to this day. Now I have two boys, a six-year-old and an eight-year-old, and seeing their bond—it’s just different from anything I had with my sisters. But I don’t think I had any complaints having sisters. Being the only boy and the youngest was probably kind of lonely at times, but that was fine. They used to paint my nails. My mom says my oldest sister used to like to play school down in the basement, and I would get upset that we didn’t have more recess during school, that kind of thing. But I still have a good relationship with my sisters to this day. I’m very thankful for my upbringing and for my whole family.

School, Sports, and Early Interests

Brenton: What about going through school—grade school, friends, hobbies? What do kids do in West Virginia?

Tim: For school, I had kind of a mixed bag. My mom homeschooled me from kindergarten to fourth grade. Then I went to a private Christian school for fifth and sixth grade. Then seventh to 12th, I went to the public school, middle school and high school. So I went to a variety of schools.

As a kid, I loved to play soccer—not basketball, as some people might be surprised to hear.

Brenton: Are you longer in the legs or longer in the torso? I forget.

Tim: I’m all torso and no coordination. But I played soccer from when I was pretty young—maybe like six or whenever you can start—until I was in middle school. I played basketball for fifth and sixth grade. I was just kind of a stereotypical boy as a younger kid, very restless and wanted to be outside playing things. We played outside a lot.

I kind of lost interest in sports going on. I’m not that competitive.

Brenton: Sounds like you were more sporty back then, and now you’re less so.

Tim: I was never that good. I’m just not that competitive or driven. As a kid, I probably was not that good at working for things. I was always very good at math and school as a whole came pretty easy to me—spelling never did, still doesn’t. I didn’t really work hard for sports.

I started to play some instruments—piano with a private teacher and then some instruments in school—but never really liked to practice. Same problem.

I’ve always been kind of into reading a lot. My mom says I used to love to read the World Book Encyclopedia when I was a kid.

Brenton: We had a set of those.

Tim: Yeah. I played with my sisters. I was in Cub Scouts from right when you can do that, and then I was a Boy Scout all the way through high school, so that was a big part of my life.

We did family things. My dad was a big golfer, so I picked up golf for a while with him until I was too tall to use my extra-length golf clubs. Then I was like, “All right, this isn’t worth it for me.”

In a lot of ways, pretty normal. In fifth grade, we got a Windows 95 computer. We had had like a DOS computer, maybe a 3.1, before that. But in fifth grade we got a Windows computer with Encarta on it.

Brenton: Okay.

Tim: Encarta 95. That just rocked my world. My mom talks about how, when I was in fifth grade, I did a report on Thomas Edison in school. As soon as we got Encarta, I found Thomas Edison, and you could play the clip from one of the early recordings—he does like “Mary Had a Little Lamb” or something, there’s still a recording of. I played that in Encarta, and that blew her mind—both that it was a thing and that I found it so fast.

I got more and more interested in computers and just tinkering with computers as time went on, which in a lot of ways led to what I do professionally. It was always kind of a side interest.

Early Programming and Lord of the Rings Websites

Brenton: You said you ran a website—I think like a GeoCities thing or something.

Tim: Yeah, in high school I started to make websites. My friend and I started making GeoCities and AngelFire pages—that was one of the competitors—probably starting in late middle school. I ran a Lord of the Rings website. Actually, my AngelFire website you can still find—I probably shouldn’t link to it—but I made a Princess Bride fan site around 2000, ‘99. I was just copying content from other websites. I learned HTML by—in those days you didn’t have all this complex stuff—so I could just go open other websites and copy and paste the HTML.

Then I started doing Lord of the Rings websites. Through that in high school, I started to get curious about programming, but I literally had no way of learning programming really. I wasn’t into BBS and forums and things around programming back then. So I graduated from high school in 2004—this is the early 2000s—and I just wasn’t in tune with what was available through the internet.

I was trying to find books to learn programming and bought a book on PHP. That was really where I first started programming, to make Lord of the Rings websites. I did that through high school. It was like 2001 to 2003 when the Lord of the Rings movies came out. I was in high school.

Brenton: It was the perfect time.

Tim: I had already read the books and was a big fan. The main site was like TheOneRing.net or something.

Tim: Yeah, I won a big competition on TheOneRing.net and won this big Weta gift that was like worth hundreds of dollars. I was active on the Lord of the Rings forums and stuff. That kind of thing got me started in programming beyond HTML—and TI-BASIC, the really basic programming you could do on a TI calculator—that’s where I really cut my teeth.

Reading and Sci-Fi

Brenton: When did you first read Lord of the Rings? And what do you like to read—more fantasy?

Tim: My cousin gave me his copies of Lord of the Rings. I have two male cousins who are like six years older than me that I idolized—shout out Justin and Joseph if you’re listening. Joseph gave me copies of Lord of the Rings. I was pretty young, maybe like nine or ten, and they sat on my shelf for a long time.

Brenton: Did you start with The Hobbit?

Tim: That’s a good question. I don’t know the answer. I finally got to reading Lord of the Rings around late middle school, like 2000-ish. I’ve never actually been a huge fantasy reader and I’m still not that much.

My mom read us Narnia as kids, so those were in my repertoire. These days I read some fantasy stuff to my kids. We’ve been reading The Chronicles of Prydain—Lloyd Alexander—they’re really old, from like 50 years ago. We’ve read the Narnia series. Eventually we’ll read Lord of the Rings. We’ve read The Hobbit.

I’ve not been a big fantasy person. I do enjoy sci-fi, usually either hard sci-fi or kind of fluff sci-fi that’s really easy. I like the hard sci-fi for the science part—like Andy Weir stuff.

Brenton: That kind of stuff.

Tim: Oh yeah, I love Andy Weir. Project Hail Mary is one of my favorites.

Brenton: I’ve read that like seven or eight times now.

Tim: I should read it again.

Brenton: The audio book is really good with the way the alien talks.

Tim: Yeah, I think I listened to it. These days I read a lot of history, some theology, biography, and I enjoy novels—I just don’t make a lot of time for them. I do listen to, like, Jack Reacher and just kind of dumb mystery thriller type stuff when I need a mental break. But I don’t have a lot of time for reading these days.

College: From Computer Engineering to Math

Brenton: So Lord of the Rings websites—that’s early 2000s, you’re graduating high school in 2004?

Tim: 2004, yeah.

Brenton: I was 2005.

Tim: The day Ronald Reagan died—graduated from high school.

Brenton: Was he giving the commencement speech?

Tim: He wasn’t.

Brenton: So then school after that—did you know where you wanted to go? Did you know what you wanted to do?

Tim: I thought in high school that I wanted to study computer engineering. I don’t think I really knew what computer engineering was, and I didn’t really know how to learn what it was. I just thought computers were really cool.

I don’t know that I even knew—I mean, I had heard of computer science, but I don’t know that I knew it was necessarily an alternative. We had a small public university nearby where I knew some people studied computing, like two-year degrees for network admin type roles. That didn’t seem that interesting to me. I didn’t love programming, even though it was something I wanted to learn and do.

Brenton: Did your parents try to influence you into a certain direction?

Tim: That’s a good question.

Brenton: Like, no one asked you to be a doctor?

Tim: No. My dad’s a doctor, my mom’s a nurse, and they never pressured us to pursue medical things. I think they largely tried not to pressure us, for better or worse. They really wanted us to go to college—that was their big goal for us. But I don’t think they necessarily pressured me a lot.

I just didn’t know people around me who were programmers or computer scientists or computer engineers. I just knew that I thought computers were neat and seemed to be kind of the future. So I had computer engineering in mind.

I was looking at Virginia Tech, which was fairly near where I grew up and obviously a very reputable school. But I’m a Christian and grew up in church, and my parents encouraged us to think about looking at Christian colleges. The college I went to was called Grove City College in western Pennsylvania. It’s a Christian college that happened to have computer engineering, which is pretty rare for smaller schools.

I actually ended up visiting there, and without that much perspective, I was like, “Oh, this is great. I’ll go here.” I went to visit Virginia Tech and Grove City, then applied to Grove City for early admission—which is basically like if you get in early, you’re supposed to go. So I applied early admission and then didn’t apply to any other colleges.

It was a fairly limited information decision. I had met somebody while I was in high school who had gone there like 20 years previously, and he really recommended it to me. I trusted him, so I decided to go as a computer engineering student.

But before I matriculated, I changed my mind to pursue physics instead, because I really loved physics in high school. I had a great physics teacher named Mr. Smith who was inspirational to me—I was his teaching assistant. I really loved the math side of physics.

In hindsight, I enjoyed that because in high school math, besides geometry, math is so routine—you’re just learning the mechanics. In physics, you’re actually getting to solve problems.

Brenton: It’s like applied math to a degree. It frames a problem you’re trying to solve or some observation.

Tim: Exactly. I never really enjoyed labs that much—partially my laziness—but I enjoyed the math and problem-solving side. So before I started, I decided to do physics. I was like, “I’ll become a physics professor, that makes sense.” I don’t think I knew any physics professors. My dad had one friend from college who had gotten a PhD in physics and then been stuck in really mediocre jobs his whole life. He was always just kind of like, “Well, be careful about that.”

Brenton: Which is the inspiration for Should You Get a PhD?

Tim: Yeah, I mean, it was good advice. To jump ahead, later I jumped out of two PhD programs and am fairly cynical now about whether PhD programs are a good route for people.

Tim: I ended up in college as a math major. I studied physics and started out—first-year physics and engineering is all pretty similar, you’re taking basic classes.

To jump back a little: in high school, I got ahead in math through basically just wanting to go faster. My parents were able to get me to take classes at a faster pace. By the end of junior year, I’d finished calculus. My senior year, I took some college math classes at a nearby college.

So I was actually ahead—I had finished calculus basically before I got to college because I’d already taken it. As a result, in college I started to explore some higher math stuff and was kind of enjoying physics, but I really didn’t enjoy the labs and hands-on side of it. More and more, I was like, “I just really love math classes.”

But I was also enjoying—I’d taken a computer programming class my freshman year, a C++ class. Despite being very different from what I’d done with PHP in high school, it really set me up for understanding what I was getting in C++. So that was fun and really scratched the problem-solving itch.

My sophomore year, I decided to change to computer science.

Brenton: So you went in as a math major?

Tim: I applied as computer engineering, went in as physics, and then a year later changed to computer science.

I continued to take some physics classes on the side and finished a physics minor. But sophomore year in computer science, you take theory of computing, which is basically a math class—you’re trying to prove things that are computable, doing Turing machines, NP problems, that kind of stuff.

I really loved that class—I thought it was really fascinating. The professor I had for my first programming class and also that theory class was a former mathematician, which is probably relevant. But then I realized all the computer science majors hated that class. They just wanted to be programming. I wasn’t just enthusiastic about programming or wanting to write programs necessarily, but I was interested in the problem-solving.

So as I was taking it and realizing it was a math class, I was like, “I should just really be a math major.”

Brenton: Did you change again?

Tim: Yeah. Freshman year I was a physics major, sophomore year I was a computer science major, and then junior year I changed to math. As a math major it was a liberal arts degree, so I had to take a language at my undergrad. I ended up my junior year starting freshman French—which I had to do four semesters of with these freshmen as a junior.

Brenton: How’s your French now?

Tim: It’s horrible, and I still have nightmares about French class. I literally wake up in the night sweating that I’m missing a French test or something.

Liberal Arts Education and History

Brenton: Did your school have gen ed courses? Did you take something that you might not have thought of before that maybe you gained an appreciation for?

Tim: Yeah. It’s a liberal arts school, and we had to do kind of a core liberal arts curriculum—really good stuff like history, art, and some basic philosophy. Being a Christian school, there was a Bible component also.

It got me interested in philosophy for sure, and it helped develop my interest in history, which is one of my biggest side interests now. Before college, I had zero interest in history.

Brenton: I feel like it’s something you gain an appreciation for over time.

Tim: Yeah, and I can’t necessarily point to one thing particularly. It broadened my world in a lot of ways and got me to think about a lot of things.

I ended up liking one of the history professors a lot. He also taught philosophy of education, so I took his philosophy of education track that’s normally just education majors. It helped me think a lot about the purpose of education.

His big thing was that the purpose of education is really “what’s the purpose of people?"—and our education should help shape people towards that.

Brenton: Do you have anything you walked away from that you carry with you today?

Tim: Yeah, I think that point I just made. As you think about education—I have four children now—what you’re trying to get out of it… is education just trying to make people better workers in a capitalist society? I think there is value in being a productive contributor to society, but it’s much bigger than just “you go and work.”

It really helped me think of education—and thus parenting—as shaping humans. What’s the full picture of what we want our humans to be? For my kids’ school, it’s not just about “is what they’re doing valuable?” The question is not necessarily “when are they ever going to use this?” but “is their mind being opened to be people who understand the world and are interested in the world and interested in people?” Hopefully having a bigger-orbed perspective on education.

And recognizing that education doesn’t just mean schooling. I don’t know if it’s a real quote, but there’s an often-quoted Mark Twain line: “I don’t let my schooling interfere with my education.” The conversations you have with your kid for 20 minutes before bedtime can be just as much of their education as their math lessons.

Brenton: In D&D, it’s like the difference between wisdom and intelligence.

Tim: Yeah, I think that’s a real thing.

Brenton: We’ll come back to the kids and parenting—I’ve got some questions there I’d like to get more of your perspective on.

Tim: Also, after college I started a program in the history of math as a PhD program. I only stayed in for a year, but that was definitely a result of my liberal arts education—being interested not just in things as “what labor produces value that makes money” but just ideas.

Some of my professors helped me be interested in history of math, but it was also my own personal development. Being curious and interested in things came through my college experience and made me interested in that as a topic.

I looked at programs like philosophy of science—a lot of departments are history and philosophy of science together. I actually took a class in history of science or philosophy of science in college as well. It just got me interested in exploring ideas for their own sake and not necessarily because they have a specific use for anyone.

Brenton: Do you have a particular period of history that you’re most interested in or find yourself studying more?

Tim: People can fast forward like 10 minutes if they want to get back to the interesting part of the podcast.

Brenton: I’m here to have a conversation with you, so…

Tim: I’m really interested in the history of science and history of math. It’s been less of something I’ve pursued since my early twenties when I started this PhD program. I ended up leaving after a year for a number of reasons, but partially because I was like, “Okay, it’s good to be interested in ideas, but I also want to eat for the rest of my life, so I should be thinking about what’s going to give me a job.”

In that program, I was interested in like applied math in the 20th century. So much happened around—a character I was interested in is like Von Neumann, who was such a massive figure, influential in the Manhattan Project but also shaped so much of modern mathematics. The 20th century math is really interesting.

Brenton: I think you’re a fan of Claude Shannon too?

Tim: Yeah, for sure. I think that kind of stuff is just so remarkable—like Bell Labs and so many players in the Manhattan Project, for better or worse. It’s really fascinating. And Feynman—I used to read Feynman’s books back in the day. That era really fascinated me.

But also earlier stuff—all the greats: Gauss, Euler, Fermat, Fourier. All of that 18th, 19th century stuff is really intriguing too.

These days, my interest is much more in American religious history. I’m interested in my own religious tradition, which is Presbyterianism and Presbyterian history in particular. But I’m also just interested in the socio-historical questions: how Christianity—primarily, not exclusively—has developed in America, and what the American experiment has enabled in terms of getting so many variants of Christianity. What kind of cultural, social, and theological perspectives caused that to develop?

My weird nerd habit is I love to drive around—I’m going to have to get some new skills here in Indiana—but in North Carolina, I’d drive around, see country churches, and think about what immigration and different religious movements led to that particular type of church being in a specific area.

That’s kind of my guilty pleasure hobby: just thinking about those ideas.

Brenton: Are you exploring the history of how things are founded and built and grow and change, or different theological perspectives of why there are different denominations?

Tim: It’s very intertwined. Both dimensions influence each other. You definitely have the theological thing, but the theological influences aren’t necessarily separated from the cultural or immigration patterns.

If you just look at the US broadly, the places Germans immigrated, you have Lutheran churches. The places Scots-Irish immigrated, you have Presbyterian churches. The places the English immigrated, you have Episcopal churches. And then all of that also morphed into the plethora of Methodist and Baptist churches.

The American religious landscape in Christianity and its variants—not to mention all other religions—is so wildly diverse in a way that would have been unimaginable 300 years ago. I just think it’s really fascinating to think about why and how that happened.

That’s what I lay in bed and think about at night to take my mind off other things. I actually just became the official webmaster of the North Carolina Presbyterian Historical Society.

Brenton: Just in time to leave.

Tim: Yeah, well, I was like, “I’m moving. I can still do it if you want.” I’ve been spending the last few weeks, aside from moving, trying to get several elderly people to help me find the password to change the DNS to fix the website. It’s been my task of late—nobody knows the password to log in.

My family is part Presbyterian for 500 years. So there’s also a personal family history aspect of it to me, which is really how it started—as an adult, learning more about grandparents and great-grandparents that I didn’t know. Piecing together their stories with American history is fascinating to me.

Anyway, that’s a topic of interest to a limited audience, but there you go.

Graduating and the Math Prize

Brenton: All right, well then we’ll come back to the mainstream. So you finally decided to switch to being a math major. Did you graduate as a math major?

Tim: I did, yeah. I graduated math with highest honors, which no one has ever cared about since. I worked too hard to be a summa cum laude math major.

Actually, there was a cash prize for the highest average grade math major, and I shared it with another guy. I wouldn’t have if I had studied for my real analysis final—if I had studied for it and not gotten a B, I would have gotten the full cash prize. But instead I shared it with another guy.

Brenton: Well, like most things, it’s best shared, right?

Tim: Probably.

Brenton: Being a math major, do you have opinions on brands of chalk, or chalk versus whiteboard?

Tim: That’s an interesting question because I’ve always hated handwriting—from when I was a child. Being homeschooled, my mom had a hard time with me hating handwriting. She used to ask, “What are you going to do when you need to write a note when you’re older?” And she says when I was pretty young, I told her I would just type it on the computer. Now she just laughs about that because that’s all we ever do.

Brenton: That’s what we call a thought leader.

Tim: Again, it’s really laziness. I still hate handwriting. I just had to sign documents to move, and they’re like, “Oh, well, it’d be good if your signature kind of spelled your name.”

I do like, in theory, writing on a board—I know mathematicians are big about chalk—and I love teaching math. But I’ve never been that great at it, and I find it very tiring. I’ve never been into ordering chalk from Japan or something.

When I did teach math, I was very poor as a grad student. An undergrad experience that was meaningful for me: the summer after my junior year, I did a REU program—Research Experience for Undergrads, an NSF-funded research program.

That was meaningful partially because I got there wanting to do a math program, and my advisor’s first question when I got there was, “How good are you at programming?”

All we did all summer was write C programs for computational graph theory—generate all these graphs and try to find the properties you want in the graphs. I went there to do math and did programming all summer, which was an impactful experience for me.

Then I came back to college my senior year, and they wanted me to do a research presentation. My roommate and one of my friends who’s like a brother to me—Todd—actually came and coached me on writing on a chalkboard because I wanted to do a good job. He stood behind me and critiqued me as I tried to give my presentation so that I would be able to do a better job.

Brenton: Just for the way it looked, handwriting-wise and composition?

Tim: Yeah, and just making sure it’s not sloping down to the side and that kind of thing. My handwriting’s not good, my spelling’s not good. It’s really not a good thing for me to be doing.

Grad School: History of Math at UVA

Brenton: So math major, then grad school. Was that something you wanted to do immediately, or were you convinced to do?

Tim: Ever since I thought “I’ll study physics in college and be a physics professor,” I was like, “Well, I’ll just go to grad school. I like school, I’m good at school.”

Brenton: Was this still the mindset of going to be a professor?

Tim: Yeah, I think that’s really what was in my mind. For undergrads who really enjoy the experience—which I did—it’s very tempting to think your professors have the dream. They’re the pinnacle. So I was going to go to grad school for math.

I considered a variety of things: math, logic in the philosophy department. I visited the University of Pittsburgh’s History and Philosophy of Math department. But then I applied and surprisingly got accepted to the University of Virginia’s History of Math program, which seems very esoteric. It’s only one professor and she’s very selective, so it was kind of surprising that I got selected. I probably shamed her by dropping out after a year.

It’s part of the math department. Your PhD is basically a math PhD, but you write a dissertation on a history topic. You take the math courses, the math qualifying exams, and then do history stuff on top of it, plus two foreign languages.

I applied to that and got accepted. But during college, I had gone every spring during spring break for four years—college students went on different mission trips around the world. I went with a group to a children’s home in Tennessee, a Christian children’s home. We just went and did manual labor projects to help them—building trails and steps, cleaning out barns, that kind of stuff.

I had a really good experience doing that. It’s a small children’s home for children in crisis situations, not of their own making—so not kids who have been particularly bad kids, but they’re from bad situations. They take students either on summer breaks during college or often right after college to come work for one to three years. You live in the home with the kids and help teach them, cook for them, and just be there with them.

I asked the University of Virginia if I could defer my admission for a year, which is pretty common in graduate programs. They said I could. So I went to work at this children’s home from 2008 to 2009 for 12 months. I lived in a house with nine boys, middle-school-age boys, and did all that—they had a kind of hybrid homeschool model. They come in with a lot of different situations, and their schooling isn’t necessarily grade level. So you’re just teaching them to what their ability is—math, history, English, reading.

Brenton: That sounds really humbling.

Tim: It was, yeah. My uncle said a very helpful thing to me: “Tim, when you go to grad school, you’ll learn how to be a mathematician. But if you do this, I think you’ll learn how to be a man.”

There’s a lot to that. Even now being a parent, it was a really helpful experience—and very hard, very tiring. But I’m really glad I did that. It was in the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee, like a half mile from the Smoky Mountain National Park.

Brenton: Do you keep in touch with any of them?

Tim: Some, off and on through the years. It’s been a while. A few of them got dismissed, not necessarily in good situations—although actually one of those who got kicked out was messaging me on Facebook maybe 18 months ago. We had some exchanges. I actually just found out recently one of them died, which was really sad to hear.

I’ve connected with a few of them on Facebook. They’re all like in their probably 30s now, which is kind of crazy. You freeze them in your mind as middle schoolers, but they’re grown-ups with kids and things.

So I did that for a year. At the same time, I was practicing my French because for this history of math program, you have to have reading competency in two foreign languages.

Brenton: I was thinking like Latin or something.

Tim: Latin could be one of them. I wasn’t interested in stuff that old necessarily. But I was practicing French reading—reading is a lot easier than speaking or hearing French. I can’t understand any spoken French. I know you’re speaking French, and that’s all I can tell.

Brenton: My grad professor was from France.

Tim: Yeah. So I did that, and then I moved straight to Charlottesville after a year and started this history of math program. I did pretty well.

My education was really good, but it was tough going up against students who had gone to bigger universities. You find out people started having taken graduate classes as undergrads, or they sat in on graduate classes, which was something I didn’t have the opportunity for at all. They just had more exposure to things.

But my grad school experience really convinced me my undergrad gave me a really solid foundation and taught me how to think—especially one professor, Dr. Thompson, who intentionally made his undergrad classes similar to graduate classes. He would give take-home tests with really open-ended questions where we were learning new material on the take-home test. That was really good preparation for grad school.

But it was still very hard. While I was there, I was kind of having something of an existential crisis around “what am I doing with my life?” and realizing I had just been going to grad school thinking “this is what I’m going to do.” I hadn’t really thought through the implications of it.

I started to realize the history of math isn’t actually that marketable of a degree to have, and you spend half your 20s getting it. Former students of my advisor, who I got to meet—they were great—but I was like, “Okay, so I’m gonna do this and then maybe hopefully get to teach at some podunk university? Maybe that’s not the best use of my time.”

Discovering Operations Research

Somewhere along—late in college—I discovered operations research as a discipline: using math and optimization models to solve business and industrial problems. I discovered that through Cornell’s program. While I was looking at grad schools, I found it and was like, “Oh, this sounds really interesting.” It matched a lot of how I think about things—optimizing things, efficiency, math, and computation all in one.

I basically decided to leave halfway through my first year at UVA. I applied to an OR program at UVA, one at North Carolina State University, and a master’s program at University of Tennessee—mostly just because I loved that area.

For a variety of reasons, I decided to go to North Carolina State. My parents had moved from West Virginia to Greensboro, North Carolina—an hour and a half away—when I was in college. Two of my sisters actually lived in Durham, which is one city over from Raleigh where NC State is. For various other reasons—I knew some other people down there—I decided to go to NC State for a PhD program in operations research.

Brenton: Did you go straight into a PhD from undergrad, or did you do a master’s?

Tim: I didn’t do a master’s. In the US, a PhD program has you take the master’s coursework for the first two years, but I didn’t do an independent master’s ahead of that.

So I graduated from college in ‘08, went straight to work at the children’s home, one year later started at UVA as a PhD student. But for the first two years, you’re doing the coursework.

Teaching Calculus

Brenton: Was your teaching before you started the PhD program, or was that part of your deal there?

Tim: I was a TA my first year, but usually you don’t teach your first year—you’re an assistant to another grad student who’s teaching. I was a TA for calculus one and two, where you’re grading and having office hours but not actually lecturing.

But that summer, I was lecturing, not having ever done it before. Actually, there’s a funny story—to me anyway. I’d actually never taken calculus two. In high school, I took calculus early like I said, but I did the AB calculus test because that’s all we had. We didn’t offer calc two. My senior year, I signed up for calculus three at that local college. Then I got my undergrad to waive the fact that I’d never taken calc two, where you learn all these tricks for integration like trig substitution. I didn’t know any of that.

By the time I TA’d, I had mostly learned it. But this girl came to my office one day when I was a TA with a question I did not know the answer to at all. I knew nothing about calc two. She actually ended up dropping the class after she came to my office, which I feel horrified about—that I ruined her life because I was doing something I was unqualified for.

Brenton: I think calculus did that.

Tim: But when I taught calc two, I learned. Teaching a week’s worth of material in a day is not only hard for the students—it’s hard for me.

Brenton: Did you have to come up with the curriculum and lessons too?

Tim: Yeah, basically the grad students had all these PDFs of notes they would pass around to each other. I would get somebody’s notes, but you’d go teach for four hours in the morning and then go home and grade and get ready for the next day. It was very intense.

But I learned so much calculus standing at the board, writing in chalk, explaining it. I’m like, “Oh, that’s what that means”—quietly to myself so the kids don’t think I don’t know.

Brenton: Quietly to yourself so the kids don’t think, you know…

Tim: Right. But discovering a very good life lesson that teaching is such a great way to learn things. As you know, I still love teaching things when I work—trying to teach my colleagues, and through various online resources I make. I still love teaching. People think I enjoy other people learning, but it also helps me learn as well.

NC State and Operations Research

Tim: So I went to North Carolina State, started doing classes again. They didn’t really care that I had been in a PhD program for a year previously. I didn’t get a degree or anything from UVA.

The motivation for doing operations research was: okay, here’s interesting problem-solving but also something that seems like it has jobs related to it because it’s useful. I don’t know if that’s actually true for operations research, but at least I was learning useful skills.

I was just doing my coursework, and then I found an advisor after a year. He asked me if I wanted to work with him. He did healthcare optimization stuff—treatment optimization. You use these mathematical models to figure out, like, what’s the optimal schedule to give a chemotherapy drug to treat cancer? He also did healthcare operations problems—like, how do you schedule your patients most efficiently so they’re not sitting in the waiting room for a long time?

Brenton: Would that be from clinical trial data, trying to build out those models?

Tim: It can be from a variety of things. They use real data, they make stuff up. I ended up doing the operations side—we partnered with the oncology clinic, collected real data on patient wait times, and built a simulation model of the oncology clinic.

Another part of operations research besides optimization is simulations—discrete event simulations. If you can build a realistic simulation of the situation, then you can modify the simulation and see if you can remove bottlenecks. Similar to Six Sigma and that kind of business optimization stuff.

Brenton: Is that what brought about the PhD downfall with Six Sigma?

Tim: No, I ended up working on semi-theoretical problems. My advisor was an expert in something called stochastic integer linear programming.

A big part of operations research is optimization problems where you have a mathematical formula you’re trying to optimize with mathematical constraints. You can describe business problems that way. But stochastic optimization says, “Oh, I’m not just optimizing these, but maybe my coefficients are random variables.” So I want to minimize the worst outcome or maximize the average or something—which is mathematically significantly more complicated.

He worked on a problem on patient scheduling. When you call your doctor and make an appointment, they’re not operating under certainty—they don’t know who else is going to schedule. So trying to quantify that uncertainty and make the best decision. He made this huge theoretical optimization problem that he could only solve for three patients. So if your clinic sees a total of three patients, you can get the optimal solution.

Brenton: We call it the three-body problem.

Tim: So I worked on essentially an approximation solution using what’s now called reinforcement learning—computer scientists had always called it that, but in operations research they called it approximate dynamic programming. It’s essentially the same thing: you simulate possible outcomes and use that to figure out your optimization.

Which was good. And another strain going on at the same time: in late 2009, I had gotten on Twitter. As a lazy, procrastinating grad student, I spent a lot of time on Twitter. Data science in that era was becoming a thing, in no small part because of people blogging about it and talking about it on Twitter. I was like, “Oh, this is really interesting—they’re using data and computation and math to solve real problems.”

This machine learning stuff sounded really interesting. I didn’t have any exposure to that in college or before.

Because of the way my program was at NC State, I was able to start taking some machine learning coursework. My research was essentially turning optimization problems into machine learning pattern recognition problems—simulating all these possible outcomes and using machine learning models to learn those patterns, then figuring out how to optimize over that.

This is 2010 to 2012, learning machine learning and data science stuff as it was becoming relevant in a way it had never been before. That was partially luck, but also me trying to shape my curriculum into things that seemed relevant in industry and useful to me. That helped set the stage for a lot of stuff.

Kiva Systems Internship

Tim: That summer—after one year at NC State—I talked my way into an internship at Kiva Systems, which is now Amazon Robotics, doing warehouse automation. I read about it over Christmas break in Wired Magazine, and found out the head of research at Kiva Systems was Pete Werman, who was an NC State professor before going to work for his old friend at Kiva Systems.

I cold-emailed him and was like, “Can I come work for you for the summer?” I turned that into an internship, which is wild that he hired me, having only talked on the phone. I drove up to Boston that summer, met him on my first day of work, and worked on simulation models for warehouse optimization.

That gave me exposure to real-world applications.

Brenton: Applications, yeah.

Tim: Optimization and basically operations research in the real world. A good taste. And it paid better than grad school did, which is another good taste of the future.

So I did that, went back, and kept going with grad school my second year. After I came back from Boston, all my free time that summer I’d been studying for my qualifying exams. I came back and passed all my qualifying exams, which is one of the big steps towards the PhD.

Brenton: That’s an accomplishment in and of itself.

Tim: Yeah. I’ve always been good at tests, which is a completely useless skill, but it helps in school.

Brenton: I mean, some people say life is a test.

Tim: I don’t think taking math tests is a good life skill, but I am good at it.

Leaving the PhD Program

Tim: I came back and did research for a year. Then the following May—after the end of my second year—my advisor called me into his office and said, “I’m taking a job at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I would like for you to stay here at NC State and continue working with me on your PhD.” He was going to have a guest appointment so he could continue to advise me.

I was like, “Okay, that’s fine. I’ll do that.” I kept working with him through the summer. The summer was a very lonely time in the office—just staring at a computer in this sterile office doing research. He was gone, actually in China for a lot of that summer. There was nothing to break up the day. I wasn’t teaching. I would go to the gym—which is something that became a hobby in my adult life—but it was a very lonely and somewhat depressing time.

By August, I was like, “He’s not even good at working with me from across the hall. How is he going to work with me from Michigan to North Carolina, which is far away?” There were other students going to have the same arrangement with him, but I was the newest student, so I was going to be in it for the longest—probably at least three more years if I’m lucky. That’s just not a good situation.

Brenton: You’re going to be there for all the learning and growing pains of trying to do that remotely.

Tim: For at least three more years. And I was not making much money—the money at NC State was worse as a PhD student than at UVA. I was making like $17,000 a year or something. I didn’t have that many expenses, but that’s not a lot of money.

So that August, I started looking for jobs—mostly locally but in the data science-ish realm. I was doing that totally on the side. I didn’t tell my advisor because I needed him to keep paying me in the meantime, and he was in Michigan, so it was okay. I was taking one class that last semester—a Bayesian networks class, like a machine learning class.

Another part of this story: over those two years of getting interested in data science stuff, I started teaching myself Python and R as well—which I learned about from Twitter. I did my research in Python, which my advisor didn’t know and he didn’t want me to do. He wanted me to do C++, which he knew. But I was like, “Oh, Python’s the up-and-coming thing, and it has this thing called scikit-learn where you can access all these machine learning models”—which we could use for our reinforcement learning. That was really good that I did that.

Brenton: You’re very proactive.

Tim: I tried to be. I really think I just got lucky in so many ways.

Brenton: Well, that’s not without effort, you know.

Tim: My effort was not always—I didn’t always know what I was doing. I don’t think it’s always good advice, like “just follow your interests and it’ll work out.” But for me, it did in a lot of ways.

I interviewed for a variety of jobs. I got offered one at a local chain of retirement homes in North Carolina. They had hired a grad student to build optimization models for their pricing structure of their nursing homes. She was rolling off the project, and they wanted somebody to do it full time. They offered me a job—for the amount of money they thought they were going to make, they didn’t offer me very much money.

Brenton: But still more than grad school was paying.

Tim: Yeah. I also got offered a job at RTI International, which is a nonprofit research company in the Raleigh-Durham area. They do government contract stuff—not defense, but kind of humanitarian government stuff: education, economics, health.

I think some executive had read an article in some business magazine about data science and thought, “We should hire a data scientist.” They basically hired me out of hype, when it was a company that was essentially doing data science for 50 years—statisticians, programmers, doing data analysis, surveys, all this stuff. They didn’t really know what they were hiring me for.

They offered me that job in October of 2012, and I decided to take it because it seemed less depressing than working in the nursing home administrative office.

So then I called my advisor. I was like, “Oh, I’m dropping out, by the way.”

Brenton: How did he take that news?

Tim: I don’t think he was totally surprised. I think he was probably disappointed that I hadn’t led on to it anymore. But I just had to protect myself at that point.

So I finished up that semester, finished up the last class, and started working late October of 2012. I’ve been in industry ever since then.

Meeting Maggie and Getting Married

Brenton: What year was this?

Tim: 2012, yeah. October 2012.

Brenton: When did you meet Maggie?

Tim: I didn’t meet Maggie until a few years later. We got married in August of 2015.

Brenton: It was right before Distill then, right?

Tim: Yeah, literally right before Distill. To jump ahead a little bit, right before I got married, I found out I was needing a new job three weeks before I got married—which was a crazy time. And then came to work with you at Distill.

Brenton: I didn’t realize those events were that close together.

Tim: We got married in August. I started working there in October, I believe. But three weeks before my wedding, my boss called me and was basically like, “The whole project is falling apart”—I worked on a DARPA project, government stuff.

At that point before Maggie, I was single, lived alone, ate a lot of peanut butter, gained weight. Not actually the best time of my life.

Brenton: Well, you know, we all go through our ups and downs. So then—okay, Distill—and then I’m debating if we want to talk about your career, because…

Tim: We can, it’s pretty public. It’s on my resume.

Brenton: Sure. I’m more interested in terms of—at least for me, selfishly—I’d like to know more about you becoming a parent. In terms of hobbies, I know you were doing the workout stuff and strongman competitions at one point. And life outside of work. Let’s start there instead of going into career stuff. Life outside of work from that point.

Hobbies: Woodworking and Hiking

Tim: One thing I discovered late in grad school: NC State has a place called the Craft Center. It’s a non-academic place for students to just go do stuff—and alumni. One thing they had is a wood shop. I actually got into woodworking for a few years there, which I wish I had known about all through grad school. I think it would have been good for my mental health.

Maybe my last semester I took a wood class. It’s an incredible wood shop—it really spoiled me because I could never have the setup they have there. For a little bit, they had a guy who was just a master woodworker teaching. I think that was actually right after I finished grad school—I continued to take some classes there.

Brenton: What did you build there?

Tim: In the classes, I made some basic stuff—a Shaker shelf, a little side table. I had been working on a big project to make a top for a standing desk, a big walnut top. I was also making a monitor stand. I never actually totally finished it, which is unfortunate. I was going to make these really cool swing-out drawers—I built nice walnut drawers that were going to be on heavy-duty pivot hinges, just pivot out on one point to open, and then mount it on standard standing desk legs.

I still have the desktop—my 3D printer sits on it now—but I never finished the monitor hutch part. I learned a lot. Wood is such an interesting, complex medium to work in because it’s so precise but also—wood is very alive because of moisture things.

Brenton: But it’s approachable.

Tim: Yeah. It makes you learn to appreciate the ability to press the undo button, because there’s no undo button in woodworking.

I also got more into hiking in that era. I’d been in Boy Scouts, but I didn’t really love the outdoors when I was younger.

Brenton: What didn’t you like about it back then?

Tim: That’s a good question. I just—it didn’t really… I think part of it is I just had a very good childhood. When I used to golf with my dad, he golfed a lot to blow off steam, and I just didn’t need to blow off steam because I had a very stable home. School was very stable. I don’t think I needed to go blow off steam that much.

But during college, I started to really enjoy the outdoors more. During and right after grad school, I got more into hiking. North Carolina just has some world-class scenery—not world-class height of mountains, but stunning scenery. I started to explore North Carolina more, the mountains more.

That also became more of an opportunity as I had money to drive myself out to the mountains, stay in a hotel, and hike.

Brenton: Speaking of driving, when did you get your Matrix?

Tim: I bought my Toyota Matrix that I still drive in 2010. Right after I moved to Raleigh. I had been driving an old Mercury Mountaineer, which is like a Ford Explorer. It was falling apart—V8, all-wheel drive, horrible gas mileage—and gas had just gotten really expensive. I lived a long way from school and was like, “I can’t afford to keep driving this.”

So I bought a Toyota Matrix with 107,000 miles on it that I still drive now with 260,000 miles on it. It’s my pride and joy. I recently joined a Toyota Matrix owner’s Facebook group.

Brenton: I had a Matrix! I had to get rid of it mainly because I was commuting 90 miles one way and it was a manual. Jolene couldn’t drive it, so we just got something else.

Tim: Mine’s the automatic, and the transmission has been rock solid.

Brenton: It’s such a good car. You can do all kinds of stuff—the seats go down and it’s got so much room.

Tim: I hauled 28 bags of mulch from Lowe’s last summer in the back. We just moved, and I packed an incredible number of boxes flat in there to take to the recycling center. I’m going to keep driving it until I can’t.

Brenton: When I took a fundamentals of engineering course, we did one of those newspaper bridges. We did this massive suspension bridge and had to put down the seats on one side so it would go from the back of the trunk to the front of the car to transport it.

Tim: Yeah. Also right as I was finishing grad school, I became more involved in my church. I became the treasurer for my church, which I did until three weeks ago—for a long time. And I became a deacon at the church. In the Presbyterian tradition, a deacon is someone who helps people who have financial needs or other material needs in the church or outside of the church. So I did that for a while.

Those early days right out of grad school felt very busy—getting used to having a full-time job. I also started living by myself for the first time with no roommates. So I couldn’t blame anyone for the bathroom or kitchen not being cleaned.

I actually like to cook a lot too. I don’t cook much anymore, but I cooked a lot through grad school and those early days. I enjoyed having people in my house—having friends over and cooking for them.

And getting into reading more—kind of back into reading in that era, being more deliberate about it. Those were my good years of reading, kind of reading in solitude before having kids. Just having a quiet house to read in.

Photography and Wildlife

Tim: Photography also started interesting me more in that era too. My dad’s always been a big photographer, and I’d taken a photography class in high school but hadn’t really stuck.

Brenton: Was it always nature photography in particular, or just photography in general?

Tim: My dad has always been really good at photographing people and events—that had never really been my thing. But I think it started to come back as I started to get more into hiking and being out in nature.

North Carolina has some world-class waterfalls. I would go to waterfalls and try to take pictures on my iPhone 5 or something—just worthless. Waterfalls are actually really hard to photograph, and maybe not worth photographing that much. But I was like, “How can I capture this?”

Brenton: Neutral density filter?

Tim: Yeah, I started to learn more about the techniques and bought different cameras.

It was actually 10 years ago last weekend that I got into—after I was married—we had an ice storm come through in January of 2016. I had a Sony a6300 or something, a little crop sensor camera. I was photographing birds on our bird feeder on the ice during the ice storm, and Maggie saw I enjoyed it so much. She said, “You should get a nicer camera.”

That kind of kicked off my interest in wildlife photography, which is now—I don’t know, we haven’t talked about photography as much in the last few years—almost exclusively my wildlife is my children at this point. Which is harder than any animal.

But it’s still my love. I would love to do more wildlife stuff—even more than landscapes. I think wildlife is what I really love.

Becoming a Parent

Brenton: Speaking of wildlife and kids, let’s talk about becoming a parent. Did you always want to be a parent?

Tim: Yeah, I’ve always loved kids. In elementary school, my parents were foster parents. I didn’t have younger siblings, but my mom’s a pediatric nurse. So she was specifically a foster parent for babies with medical needs—that was her expertise.

We had, not for long term—they’re mostly short term—but we had 25 different foster kids in my elementary school years. Some as short as like a weekend, and some for maybe months at a time—but not years.

My mom was kind of the revolving door of child care for her friends—her friends’ kids were all at our house all the time. So I was just around a lot of kids growing up, and that was a good experience for me.

Brenton: Do you think that might have influenced or motivated you to do the children’s home stuff?

Tim: Yeah, probably. Those were older kids—middle-school age—kind of a different demographic in a lot of ways, but I’m sure that was influential.

I always hoped I would have kids. I was around a lot of big families growing up. I grew up in a family of four, which is a big family—it’s above average.

Maggie and I got married in August of 2015.

Another kind of crazy story you probably don’t know: Maggie’s older sister had married one of my best friends from college two years earlier. That’s how we met. My brother-in-law is one of my closest friends from college. She had grown up in a big family as well and always wanted to have kids.

We had our first, James, two years and one day after our wedding. We checked into the hospital on our second anniversary—he was a week late.

And now we have four: eight, six, almost four, and two. Boy, boy, girl, girl—kind of in the even gap in this little window. Which is a good distribution. It’s crazy—you could not have planned it any better.

It’s really fun to see the kids get to enjoy each other. They all enjoy each other, but the boys really pair off and do a lot of boy stuff, and the girls pair off and giggle and talk about princesses a lot. It’s very fun.

Brenton: I’m curious about your thoughts and philosophies of parenting. You had a pretty happy, healthy childhood. What are some things you take away from your parents that you try to mimic with your kids?

Tim: I think one thing with my parents is I always knew that they loved and supported us and just had our backs. That’s a big thing we want our children to see—that we’re there for them.

We also want them to know we’re in charge. I’m not as much into some of the modern parenting that’s more like you’re chummy with your children. We really enjoy the time with them, but we are in charge. They hopefully really know that we’re supporting them.

As I was describing my college situation and liberal arts education—really opening their minds—my kids are homeschooled for right now. Maggie teaches them at home, the boys anyway—they’re eight and six.

We’re trying to make education not just a really rote thing—“here you just have to follow these steps”—or just learning things that are useful in the sense of “you’re going to be able to get a job one day.” I think it’s good to be able to get a job—we’ve talked about that. But at the same time, we want them to really understand and think deeply and understand the world and even just enjoy the world.

There’s teaching your kids to just enjoy things. Liberal arts education—often that’s in literature and stuff, really enjoying it. For me, having studied math, I just intrinsically enjoy math. I think it’s really beautiful—people hear that and think “oh, arithmetic”—and arithmetic is in its own way—but math at a higher level is past arithmetic.

I think math is intrinsically a beautiful thing, and we’re trying to teach the kids to embrace that beauty of things.

Brenton: The further you go into something, the more nuanced it becomes. The more you appreciate the challenges or perspectives, and it broadens your perspective in general.

Tim: Yeah. Feynman said something like—to paraphrase—nothing’s boring enough if you go deep enough into it. I don’t know if that’s totally true, but there’s a lot of truth to that.

You and I both got into “data science” interested in doing more of the interesting machine learning models. Both of us have done a lot more infrastructure stuff. I know you probably do some model stuff, but I exclusively do infrastructure-type engineering things now.

I gave a talk about this a couple of years ago, but learning to embrace the beauty even of that has been a formative thing for me. I want to instill that in my kids—not about programming necessarily, but just about the things they do.

With all the hardships and evil in the world, there’s such a great world to live in. So many beautiful things.

Brenton: There’s a Brandon Sanderson book, and there’s a quote I really liked. It’s something along the lines of: “It’s a difficult time to live. It doesn’t have to be a difficult time to love.”

Tim: Yeah. There’s a C.S. Lewis quote along the same lines—where he’s defending writing things during World War II. He basically talks about, you know, if the bombs fall on us while we do it, we should just be making the most of it while the bombs fall.

I don’t know if that’s my political philosophy necessarily, but I do try to look at the world that way. Even in the drudgery of my own work, I try to really embrace the beautiful parts of it.

We both love our different hobbies. Hobbies are an opportunity to just enjoy good things—even if you’re not sharing it, even if nobody knows about it. You do all kinds of things in your own home that people don’t know about.

Brenton: I think one of my favorite things about different hobbies is learning that things are complicated. Problems are easier when they’re not yours, kind of a thing. It helps you appreciate that somebody does something—you can appreciate that it took a lot of effort or some courage to do.

I used to watch a lot of Bob Ross, and one of the things he used to talk about was—he would paint the whole background and then you want to put the big tree in the front, the foreground. He’d say, “Okay, now you got to be brave and put this thing in.” I was laughing—what is this guy talking about, being brave while you’re painting? It’s just a painting.

But I’ve painted, and you have to have some courage to mess up the thing you just spent a lot of time doing—to take that risk and put something new in front of it.

Tim: Yeah. In my attempt to not just do things in life that I’m good at, I’ve learned as an adult to really work hard and push through things and just try things. That’s something I’m trying to instill in my kids.

One of them doesn’t like to do something if it’s not going to turn out well. I tell them about the Edison quote—“we’ve learned a thousand ways that don’t work.” That’s what I do in my job all day long—try things, see it doesn’t work, try something else. I just restarted a failing computation job right before you and I got on. Although now my AI tools are pretty good at doing that for me, so maybe I’m gonna get back to being lazy.

Brenton: How do you think being a parent has impacted you?

Tim: I’d have to give that some reflection. One thing I’ve definitely experienced—and a lot of people, and maybe more surprisingly a lot of fathers, talk about this—being a parent makes you a lot more emotional. You can’t watch an emotional scene in a movie the same way. Or any movie where a kid gets hurt—it’s just impossible to watch. You experience it differently when you don’t have kids.

I think it keeps you young in some ways. Your kids are at the stage they’re at, and you can be an adult most of the time, but sometimes you can just sit down with a two-year-old.

Brenton: You experience childhood vicariously, I guess.

Tim: Yeah. One of the cool things—all my kids have had this, and I’ve seen some people on Twitter mention it, I think it’s fairly universal but I don’t know why—two-year-olds have a stage where they get obsessed with seeing the moon. Every time they get out of the car, it’s like, “Look, the moon, the moon!” Around two years and three months or so.

Those kinds of things are such a good reminder—like, oh, this is crazy. There’s this huge rock flying around us every day, and we totally take it for granted. There are so many things kids are learning for the first time. It’s like, “Oh yeah, I should stop and appreciate that the moon is up there, appreciate the stars are up there.”

Brenton: One of my favorite things about astronomy and astrophotography is it’s very humbling, I think.

Tim: Yeah. I was hoping at our new house—you gave me some telescope recommendations a while ago. My eight-year-old keeps asking about it.

Brenton: Those have probably changed by now.

Tim: Well, I was hoping our new house would be perfect, but they recently installed some new street lights right behind us that I didn’t know were going to be there. It’s not as dark as I thought. But we’re kind of on the edge of Indianapolis, so I’m hoping we can get out a little bit more and start getting into some astronomy together.

Brenton: Really fun, especially with the kids—everyone’s seen it for the first time.

Tim: Yeah. There are a lot of things that are just neat to—like reading to the kids. That’s been one of my favorite things as a parent. Some stuff I’ve been reading to them for the first time—that’s fun—but like getting to read The Chronicles of Narnia to them, which my mom read to us. Or reading The Hobbit to them.

Brenton: Are you going to do Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit?

Tim: I’m a little torn on when to read The Lord of the Rings. There’s a Tolkien quote about how Lord of the Rings isn’t a children’s book, and you can only read it for the first time once, so don’t do it too soon. I would love to start it now, but I think I want to wait till they’re a little older.

But even then, just getting to think, “What other stuff can we read together?” My boys and I read most evenings before bed. Recently they’ve gotten into the Three Stooges—they sometimes beg me to watch the Three Stooges instead of reading to them. But that’s been really fun.

AI and the Future

Brenton: With the way things are—AI taking over the world for better or worse, the Pandora’s box is open—the world is changing very dramatically. How does that impact your hopes and thoughts about your kids and their future, their prospects?

Tim: It’s a big question. I’ve thought about it some, and I really just don’t know the answers.

The short answer for me is: for them, not much needs to change yet. My boys love to do image generation on ChatGPT or Gemini. It’s usually like “make a baby riding a motorcycle on Mars” or something silly.

With my eight-year-old—he just has endless questions about things: animals, technology, TV shows. So we’ll ask the AI.

Brenton: You had a World Book Encyclopedia to flip through.

Tim: Yeah, I should get him some—I try to get him a lot of reference-type books because he’s a lot like me and likes that kind of stuff.

I’ve been trying to teach my boys some basic programming using Scratch—a visual programming thing—and some iPad stuff. With my eight-year-old, I think we could probably vibe code a game using Claude Code and some kind of text-to-speech thing. He could just talk to the computer and build some kind of game. I’m excited to show him something like that.

But at the same time, it seems to still be really valuable to learn the fundamentals. I don’t want to derail him from learning the fundamentals.

Brenton: It makes me think of calculus three—that was the time we were allowed to start using a graphing calculator. That is the moment I stopped learning calculus.

Tim: Yeah. I remember when I was teaching calculus, Wolfram Alpha had come out and was showing the steps on integration and derivation.

I’m really glad I was in school in an era where I just had to grind through problems. That professor who would give us long take-homes that you’d spend eight, twelve hours on, just really wrestling through problems—probably now, if you took his abstract algebra take-home test, ChatGPT could one-shot solve the entire test.

Which is awesome—I use these tools all day, every day, and it’s fantastic. But I’m so glad I was schooled in foundations in a lot of ways.

Brenton: Similarly, I’m glad we grew up before social media and the internet kind of took over. I don’t know what it would be like to grow up with that just being in your face all the time.

Tim: Absolutely, yeah. We’re slow to introduce technology things to my kids.

It seems unquestionable that AI stuff is going to have an impact on whatever they choose to do in their careers—and at some point in their schooling if they’re going to college. I don’t want to keep them from learning how to use those tools well.

But at the same time, with programming stuff, I use AI tools literally eight-plus hours a day. Maybe I deceive myself sometimes, but I think I’m better at using them because of a lot of experience prior to using them—understanding Python really well and how things work.

I have a lot of both professional experience and education and fundamentals that are still useful. I can still think about the time complexity of an algorithm that the AI tool generates.

I honestly don’t know what all those answers look like. But it’s probably to some degree comparable to not rushing to using the graphing calculator—or the TI-89 that could do symbolic integration. It is worth actually grinding through and learning some stuff first.

But it’s going to be harder and harder for that. Kids in public school are getting Chromebooks, and once you have Google Docs, you’re getting access to Gemini.

Brenton: The cognitive offload is pretty real.

Tim: Absolutely. All of us are wrestling with that in our own jobs—what the implications are, what’s good and bad about it.

Even just writing—I don’t think I’m an amazing writer, but I went through school having to really write and being graded on that and learning from that. I want my kids to learn how to write well because I want them to be able to communicate their ideas well—not just generate essays.

I honestly don’t know all the answers. I’ve been asking everybody on my podcasts about the future, and nobody really knows. I don’t know either.

Moving to Indiana

Brenton: Speaking more about the future and maybe wrapping up—you just did a pretty big move. What are your aspirations going from here, from a hobby perspective or family perspective?

Tim: We moved to Indiana to be closer to family—my wife’s family specifically. She grew up in the town we’re living in now.

In a lot of ways, we’re just trying to develop that. Neither of us have really lived that close to family as adults.

Brenton: Especially being as close with family as you guys are.

Tim: With kids, our kids have not grown up spending a lot of time with family. Now they have a cousin who’s a mile away, which is a whole new experience. We’re hoping to lean into that and really make the most of it.

Maggie and I are currently—if you have any opinions—Maggie wants us to find a new hobby that she and I can do together in the evenings when the kids are in bed.

Brenton: I was going to say board games, but we know where that’s going to go.

Tim: I’m not a board game player. Our off-and-on activity has been playing Cat Quest on the Switch.

Brenton: There’s a studio that makes exclusively two-player games—the most recent one was called Split Fiction, which was really good. And they have It Takes Two, which is like a relationship-sort-of game. It’s really good—I would recommend that for video games. I don’t know if it’s on the Switch though.

Tim: My buddy’s been playing that with his wife.

Brenton: The most recent one is Split Fiction—more like a platformer puzzly kind of thing, but it does things in such a neat way.

And then painting—I like painting quite a bit. Try to constrain how much you’re doing in a given time. I get these little four-by-six canvas blocks and just do something small.

Tim: My sister-in-law who lives a mile from us is a very successful professional painter.

Brenton: Well, don’t invite them. Or get tips and then don’t tell Maggie—then you can show them off.

Tim: I like the idea of foraying into something I don’t have a lot of ability in.

Brenton: We did pottery for a while—that’s not something you can do readily at home without some investment. But we did a pottery class for like eight weeks and then rented studio space and did that for quite a while. It was a lot of fun.

Tim: At the place I did woodworking, we took one pottery class before we had kids. That was really enjoyable.

Brenton: Anything like making or going through that creative process together is always fun.

Tim: Yeah. We’ve just spent the past eight years having kids—a very intense time of our life. We’re not planning to have more. Now we have a sort of clean slate. What kinds of things can we do?

We also have a big basement now, which is awesome. I have space to do stuff.

Brenton: For the board game collection.

Tim: Yeah, you know me. Unfortunately, my kids are enjoying games. Unfortunately. I’m not going to get into that. All Maggie’s family here loves games too, so… might have to…

Brenton: I’ll have the podcast part two—I’ll have to get some more understanding of your perspective there.

Tim: Part of it is I’m not competitive.

Brenton: Okay, that makes sense.

Making Things and Knitting

Tim: Part of it is—something we haven’t really talked about—I really do love to make stuff. I loved woodworking. One of my main hobbies now is making websites—putting stuff online. My current big project is the Python Developer Tooling Handbook.

Brenton: What about the basketball thing? Is that just a chain of tweets?

Tim: It was a Twitter and Instagram account. I’ve tried to turn it into a website—I need to use Claude Code now to get that going again. My “Do You Play Ball” site. And I do some religious history-related stuff online too.

I really love making things. Even loving to read—that’s actually a tension for me in my hobbies. Reading is like you’re not making anything. When I sit down to do something, I love to just tinker. A website is a common outlet for that.

Even photography, I think for me, is making something. Photographers talk about “making an image”—and I really do think that’s true. Not just in how you capture it and how you decide to capture it and how you choose to edit it, but even choosing what images you show versus which ones you delete is part of the making process.

Brenton: People delete pictures now?

Tim: I delete a lot. Quite a bit.

Brenton: It sounds like one thing to add some variety would be the tangible kind of creation—something that’s not on the computer, like the woodworking kind of thing.

Tim: I also like to knit. Do you know about me knitting?

Brenton: I do know about you knitting. I forgot to bring that up too.

Tim: That’s something Maggie and I do sometimes together. She crochets, and I knit as a hobby. We do that and watch movies or something.

Brenton: And your rocking chairs.

Tim: Yeah, I wish I had a rocking chair.

Brenton: I know someone who’s making a rocking chair.

Tim: My boys are actually trying to teach them how to crochet right now, which is fun.

Brenton: That’s cool.

Tim: Knitting is a very slow way to make things, but it’s something I started back in college 20 years ago. I picked it up again recently.

Brenton: You’re gonna need it for all the cold weather.

Tim: It has been unbelievably cold here. It was six below Fahrenheit this morning when I woke up. And now it’s 10 PM, it is four above zero. It has been so cold for the two weeks I’ve been here.

Here’s a hat that I knit—I never actually really finished it, but…

Brenton: That’s really nice.

Tim: I’m actually a very good knitter. People get intimidated when they see it.

Brenton: You could go to the knitting circle. Jolene’s been eyeing one at the local store—try and encourage her to go.

Tim: It’s all ladies, but it’s fun.

An interesting thing about knitting is that knitting patterns are written in a really abstract way. If you’re used to programming and math, they’re very unintimidating to read. They’re not even complicated logic—it’s just really concise so they can put it on one page. I think that’s why people find the actual mechanics of complicated things aren’t usually that hard—it’s just, are you willing to be patient with the abstract stuff? Which is a no-brainer to me.

Brenton: There’s also the geometry aspect too, in terms of crochet—there’s like a…

Tim: Knitting is less geometric in the sense that when you’re knitting, you basically only are in one dimension at a time. Crochet is sort of more dimensional because it’s less constrained. But knitting is so constrained that if you can understand the abstraction, it’s only a very limited scope at any given time. Because you’re in one place and you can’t be in other places—I mean, there are some exceptions.

Brenton: The other thing that’s neat about crochet is there’s no machine that can crochet. So every crochet piece you find somewhere in a store—that’s been handmade. There’s something special there, I think.

Tim: Yeah. That’s what Jolene points out to me all the time. That’s cool. And she picked up knitting too, so she’s been doing a lot of that.

You can machine knit too, but to get really intricate stuff, usually you can’t machine knit it as well.

Brenton: You like the Fair Isle stuff where you make the pictures and things?

Tim: Yeah, I enjoy Fair Isle as well.

Brenton: Or the pixel art sort of stuff.

Tim: Yeah, it’s very fun.

Closing

Brenton: All right. Hey, buddy. It’s been lovely to talk to you. It’s been a while.

Tim: Do you feel like you know me better?

Brenton: I feel like I know you better. I feel like there are things we can still talk about. I’d like to talk more—you know, philosophy, theology, those types of things. I think would be a fun conversation to have. So if this thing gets like 10,000 likes or something, we can do that part two. Sounds good.

Where can people find you? Do you have anything you want to plug?

Tim: I mean, this podcast is at podcast.tdhopper.com, which is my main website, and that links to most of my stuff. I’m tdhopper on Twitter/X and Instagram. “tdhopper” is kind of my online identity;.

Brenton: All right, well, send my love to Maggie and the kids. It’s been nice spending more time with you.

Tim: Yeah, thanks Brenton. Thank you. Bye.