About

I was born in Connecticut and grew up outside Austin, Texas. I studied economics at Texas A&M University, graduating with a BS. I started my career as an accountant, but soon found my way into software engineering, where I’ve spent the bulk of my professional life working for fintech companies. You can read more about that side of things on my professional site.

Personality

To steal a phrase from Gwern, I am pathologically curious. I am also profoundly impatient and was in a big hurry to grow up as a kid. I no longer believe very much in the stability of Big Five personality tests over time, because until I was about twenty-seven I scored very high in agreeableness and now I score moderately low, but for what it’s worth, I have always ranked very highly in openness, very low in neuroticism, about the 60th percentile in conscientiousness, and near the middle in extroversion.

I grew up in a happy household, I think: not without its problems, but with a great sense of mutual familial love. One consequence of our rather large single-story floor plan was a tendency to stay in our own rooms, doing our own activities in the morning and evening. For all of high school, I woke up, ate breakfast and departed for school before anyone else in my family was awake. In the evenings I was mostly left alone, save for an extremely consistent family dinner that I always enjoyed.

To this day I enjoy and prefer being alone in the mornings and evenings, and I often become agitated when I can’t find the alone time. This is a known eccentricity of mine that has helped me keep consistent with my reading and writing habits, so long as my full-time job isn’t asking too much of me..

Interests

Writing is my first love. I care about philosophy, culture, and organizational design; how people think, how they coordinate, and how institutions succeed or fail. I’m an insatiable reader of both fiction and nonfiction, and am a great admirer of language and how it impacts the world.

I have a mind for technology, but also a mind for creative writing. Truth be told, except for AI, technology in itself doesn’t interest me much, although I do deeply enjoy messaging as a form of communication. I suspect that, had I lived before the internet, my greatest discretionary expenditure would’ve been postage. I’ve come to enjoy essay writing the most and I read disproportionately more nonfiction than fiction, although I read both at a much higher rate than average. I distrust documentaries as a medium.

At university I studied economics, which I find interesting and highly relevant to the world. I minored in history and love it very much. I conducted undergraduate research in both, my focuses for which, which I will still ramble about for hours when encouraged to do so, were the Dutch Golden Age, American history before 1860, and elite culture around the turn of the 20th century a la Thorstein Veblen.

Outside of work and reading, I enjoy birdwatching, photography, chess, tennis, the study of history, 3D printing, and archery, among other things.

This site

train.place is where I publish essays and track my reading stats. The essays tend to be reflective and long-form; see Reflections on Crypto for an example of the kind of writing I publish here. Lest I speak too much in advance of the actual writing, I will leave it at that for now.

The site is deeply integrated with biblio, a home-grown library management system I maintain for myself. It’s not currently open sourced, but I might do that in the future. Reading stats, the “currently reading” text on the landing page, and book reviews all sync from biblio, and the site redeploys automatically whenever they change.

Contact

Contact information is available on my professional site.