Introduction

I am a photonics engineer with seven years experience developing integrated photonics components (and occasionally free-space optics) for use in telecommunications, biological sensing, EUV lithography, non-traditional computing and trapped-ion quantum processor units. I’ve decided to give that up in favour of pursuing a career in something that has caught my eye in the last couple of years, AI (alright, it caught my eye a decade ago with Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence, but I was only interested in alignment theory back then).

Over the last two years I have spent a lot of time teaching myself software engineering and machine learning, going through Jeremy Howard’s fasti.ai course, the famous Karpathy Neural Networks: Zero to Hero and CS231n lectures, as well as countless other materials and doing mini coding projects along the way. I’ve made a lot of mistakes on this journey, and I hope to make many more mistakes (better and faster mistakes) in the future.

This blog was inspired by Simon Willison’s TIL blog (who was in turn inspired by John Branchaud TIL blog idea, comprehensively discussed in How I built a Learning Machine). I want to document my learning and force myself to pay more attention to what I’m learning, in the spirit of Michael Nielsen’s quote on the Conversations with Tyler podcast:

Any general-purpose strategy you have which will cause you to pay attention to the world is incredibly valuable, so I collect things like that.

Yes. Yes!

I am committing to posting 3-5 TIL’s per week, with the stretch goal of posting something every day. There is great power in streaks.

CV

Here are two versions of my CV, one nice and pretty, the other in ATS-friendly plain text :