About Me
I am an engineering director at Wave. I’m excited by the power of software, and I want to bring that power to people who are currently less well served by it.
I graduated from MIT in 2013 with a bachelors degree in Computer Science and a minor in Math. While there I helped organize Splash.
I love folk music (fiddle, singing) and dance (contra, English, waltz, rapper). Some specific affiliations:
- I am part of the group that organizes Youth Trad Song Weekend
- I dance rapper with Harbour Steel
- Played fiddle with the no-longer-active contra dance band Switching Protocols
You can hear some of my music on my Youtube Channel
Parenting Blog
Anecdata: Rapid Covid tests on babies
Jo was exposed to covid through another kid in April, when she was ten months old. I ran a rapid test on her daily from a couple days after she was exposed until she recovered from covid. The swab quality I was able to get was very low–I considered myself successful when I was pretty sure the swab had touched the membranes in both nostrils. Nevertheless, Jo tested positive before showing symptoms beyond being unusually sleepy. This experience has caused me to worry a lot less about the swab quality on my own rapid tests.
Read on →
Older Writings
Here are my favorite blog posts from my earlier round of blogging (circa 2013-2016), preserved for posterity.
Learning to Listen
I’ve noticed particular people being good at listening, both in very casual and very personal situations. I am not one of these people, but would like to become one. I’ve asked some people what they do and I’ve done some practicing and this is what I’ve learned so far.
Read on →Gender Free Dancing is for Everyone
In which I discuss why even straight people benefited when Berkeley's previously gendered contra moved to gender-role-free language. Read on →More Discoveries about Listening
It’s been a bit more than a year since I’ve been thinking about how to listen better. It’s hard to attribute any particular successful conversation to the things I’ve learned, but I haven’t been afraid that I’m dominating a conversation as often, and I’ve had some good successes learning interesting things from other people, and I have been able to help friends who needed to get something off their chest, and done a good job. That being said, I still think I have a ton of space to improve, and my successes are disproportionately with people who seem to like talking anyway.
Read on →Who Gets Booked in the Bay Area, Music Edition
I recently spent roughly 20 hours on airplanes had time to take on a silly useless project. So I took all of the Bay Area contra dance schedules for the last two years, converted the information into csv format, and made pretty pictures of the results. Since there’s a lot of stuff there, I’m commenting on music related things in this post. I will comment more in future posts.
Read on →Who gets booked in the Bay Area, Callers Edition
In which I comment on who was booked to call Bay Area contra dances in 2013 and 2014. Read on →Contra Dance Bookings and Gender
I promised a while ago I would write a post analyzing gender in the context of contra dance bookings. This post keeps that promise. I was hoping to be able to draw more interesting conclusions, but alas, my dataset was too small to do so with any confidence.
Read on →