What I'm Doing Now

Hello world!

Since late January, I've been on a self-defined sabattical. This sabattical was in part to reevaluate the direction of my career. I've been reading the 80,000 hours website to get some inspiring ideas of meaningful areas to go into. This brought me to Artificial Intelligence Safety development, a subset of AI development and a topic that intrigued me when I was first a student in the Computer Science department at UGA. My Intro to CS professor, Dr. Walter Potter, was also the director of the AI masters program there. The world of AI seems to have changed much in the last 20 years, and so I've started looking at ways to enter into that domain.

This brings me to the rebuild of this site! I'm currently rebuilding it in order to quickly learn Next.js (and Python!) to scale up on the main languages and frameworks used in AI work. I imagine this may have some kind of connection to an AI engine, but what form that takes remains to be seen. I am also refreshing my Linear Algebra and Multivariable Calculus skills first learned at UGA. A million shouts out to Kahn Academy for being such a wonderful teaching resource!

So all this is to say, I'm happy to be in the playground of future possibilities for now. Even if I wind up going back into Rails development (something I'd been doing for close to fifteen years), this is feeding my fiction. It may also feed another creative project that is in the very beginning stages, something I hope to talk about more in the not too distant future.

Speaking of the word arts, I'm a part of a local writers book club, and we are currently reading The Science of Storytelling. Mayhaps I will take another nod from Derek Sivers and write up bullet notes of the book? I'm also currently reading Sandworms of Dune (I always have a fiction book in the works), the last of the Dune series as originally envisioned by Frank Herbert.

Since a bit before January, I've been training for the St. Pete Run Fest Half-Marathon in St. Petersburg, FL on November 13, 2022. That's about three months to go! This will be my first half-marathon (13.1 miles). I'll likely be writing a longer post on running (heck, I could write a longer post on every topic here), so keep an eye out for that if you're interested.

That's all for now, folks! Thanks for reading.