Hello to everyone reading this! What should we start with? I suppose I can first start with an introduction. My name is Jarett, I am a 22 year old Software Engineer. I currently reside in San Francisco and am working as a Founding Engineer at a company called Vals AI, where we work on cool stuff related to AI and evaluations.
What are my interests? I am glad you asked. My hobbies include Magic The Gathering, reading books, and exercising (but maybe I am just larping since I don’t have a gym membership right now).
A gym membership is on my long list of TODO’s for the month. I am in the South Mission area and last night while looking for gyms I found that most of them are just personal training gyms. I don’t think I would be interested in having a personal trainer, I just like to blast music and lift weights. Also why the heck are gym memberships so expensive? They range from $100 - $250 which is way more expensive than what I am used to paying ~$25 - $40. Not only that but the facilities are kinda mid, although I think for the city Fitness SF is fairly priced.
Now you are probably wondering why you are still reading this? Well, I for a fact don’t know. Lets switch gears since SF is a tech city and a question I get asked a lot is “how did you get into software?”.
I got into software a long time ago, so long ago I don’t even know what else I would enjoy doing at this point. I remember working on a discord bot for a community discord server I was an admin of. During that time I was trying to learn javascript and joined one of those “How do I program” community groups to learn how to be like the cool kids. Long story short, I ended up getting emoted on by someone 5 years younger for not knowing basic syntax and opted to self teach myself using youtube. Over the years I have worked on many projects and that knowledge accumulated with a formal education and allowed me to work as a Software Engineer.
Yeah… kinda sad, but hey? Self teaching yourself is a critical skill to have in order to succeed. Over the years I have been able to self teach myself a lot of things. For example, I started self teaching myself Japanese my senior year of high school. I am still learning the language, luckily I did a study abroad back in the day which ignited my will to continue grinding. I have since then been to Japan numerous times and collected a library of light novels and manga that I read. Fortunately, I am employed so I can afford to keep going. I keep telling myself that I will eventually study to take the JLPT N1 exam (proficiency exam for Japanese), but its only offered in a few places and I don’t have an immediate need for it. In exchange, I have been reading books to learn. Thinking out loud that would be a good blog post for the future. I can write about all the studying tricks I have learned over the years.
Blog post goals?
I am still thinking about this. These “blogs” are going to be a way for me to write about things that I find interesting that are too long to explain in a conversation. Have you ever had that happen before? You want to talk about something that you realize you can’t explain easily and you think writing it down and sharing over slack is better. But then you get an emoji like a thumbs up back and its like okay maybe not so interesting.
These blog posts are that kind of feeling. An archive of semi-interesting topics that I learn about and decide google needs to index. As I create more blog posts they will gradually get more structured. So if you think this kinda sucks to begin with, you are probably right. I am cringing at the thought of anyone I know reading this. Also, I am going to do my best not to use AI to reformat or neaten these. As a challenge to myself and so my posts are written in my own voice. Have you noticed that before? You see an article or post and think “yeah this one was clauded”. Take it from someone who works a lot with LLMs, your instinct is probably right. Also for the future I reserve the right to include em dashes in my writing.
Conclusion
TL;DR I will be writing about various different things (mostly tech related) and as I write more blog posts I will gradually improve. So if you are reading this, please forgive me for not reaching your expectations. I am thinking of creating an “Ideas” tab with a list of adhoc things that I may write about. I plan on writing a blog post once a week. I may also write it in advance and schedule a post to be auto deployed to the site. I do have that sort of bandwidth as an engineer. That way if I go traveling or have free time to write a lot I can space out the posts so nobody gets spammed.
I think this is a good note to end my first post at. I don’t want to write anymore since it will probably end up looking like a rant. Till next time :saluting-emoji: (yeah I know I don’t have emoji support right now).