Please Leave a Message After The Tone

Despite the silence here, a fair amount of stuff has happened.

The bottom line is that I have to get used to a new reality where I’ll be moving away from stuff like natural language processing, distributed computing, behavioral analysis and all the other paraphernalia of Big Data due to what I’ll politely term as organizational change.

Which is sad, really, both because I had my heart set on it (easily the most fun I’ve had in the past three years exploring needs, tools and technical approaches) and because I was making some pretty good headway.

I was growing, dammit. You just don’t get many chances to do that in technology (even in startups¹).

So I did what I usually do – I decided to keep at it on my own time, and crank up the volume a bit. I’ve stared going through at least one research paper every couple of evenings, drafting notes on it, and (when feasible) hammering out the basics in a few snippets of code².

I also looked (rather wistfully) at post-grads in Machine Learning. I’ve never felt any need to do a post-grad (never bothered with a full MBA when I was in Marketing, only a management course), but the big advantage of getting into one would be having a set pace and fixed goals (which are essential if you intend to multi-task like this).

Life’s too short, though, and I need to sort out a few things before I can even consider that – like a certain feeling of nostalgia every time I look back and remember the times when I worked in a multi-cultural, corporate setting.

So I’ll likely be a little more quiet than usual here while I sort out all the above. After all, technology is fun, but only inasmuch as it fulfills you.