Who is Noah?
I tried, and failed, to write this page. At least three times.
A brief history of time
Fine. If it helps give context or lend credibility to my name, here’s a terse autobiography, roughly in chronological order.
- I spent my formative years physically in Raleigh, North Carolina. Practically speaking, I lived on IRC with a bunch of lovable weirdos.
- I moved to Munich, Germany, for the summer after I graduated high school, working on the Agavi PHP MVC framework. I learned to speak virtually no German, but I did discover that traveling is fun.
- I attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for a year, and I ostensibly majored in linguistics and physics. Don’t ask me about either of those fields today; I can’t help you.
- I dropped out and started my software engineering career in the delightful online advertising industry. Jokes aside, I got a taste for running production systems, doing more with less (try handling Google-scale traffic with a bunch of hand-me-down Dell PowerEdge 1950s), data analysis, reporting, and the importance of the almighty dollar.
- When I was 22, I took an amazing opportunity to be a technical fellow at the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology in Accra, Ghana, where I lived for nearly a year. Ghana is a wonderful place full of kind, thoughtful, beautiful people. I am very proud of all my students. Of the companies I helped them start, I know meQasa is still thriving.
- When I returned to the US, I spent several years building data-driven financial reports for hedge funds at a tiny outfit in Portland, Oregon. I still live in the Portland area. It’s a good place.
- I later spent some time working at a data visualization SaaS startup. Data seems to be a theme for me. Through a series of acquisitions, I now primarily work on research projects in the Office of the CTO for Perforce.
- I have lots of side projects. They mostly go nowhere. I don’t mind. Everyone should have pointless endeavors if they’re able, and I feel very privileged to be able. Lately mine have taken the form of more tangible things, but I used to write a lot of open-source code, too.
- I’ve welcomed two children to the world. It is a joy to see them learn and grow. Trying to make them good stewards of our planet forces me to be better, too, and I am thankful for them every day.
Apologies
This is a list of things I do that I shouldn’t do:
- I use too many commas. It makes my writing needlessly hard to understand. Sorry.
Responsible use of LLMs
Everything on this site is written and edited by hand. It is pure, unadulturated thought directly from my brain to your browser window. I don’t even use a spellchecker; I rather like the satisfaction of catching errors myself (or having you email them to me, I guess). I believe writing to be primarily a creative pursuit, the kind of work that, if replaced by computers, will only do a disservice to society.
That’s not to say I’m opposed to the use of LLMs in general, though. For tedious work, like summarizing lots of documents efficiently, text extraction, or normalizing disparate data, I’ll happily build around LLMs to get what I want. My promise is simple: I document how I reach my conclusions. If I use an LLM to help me figure something out, I’ll tell you, and I’ll even provide the source code, data, and parameters I used. In the same way, if I do an informal poll of my friends, I’ll tell you that, too.