Sorry this blog has been so silent. From February through April, I was participating in the intensive programming course at the Flatiron School. It was fairly all-consuming, demanding about twelve hours of attention per day, and some weekends.

It was exciting, because it represented an opportunity to launch a new career, to build a technical skill, and develop mastery over some body of knowledge. Having become frustrated with the labor market during my first few months in New York, I found the idea of building expertise incredibly appealing.

I began keeping a technical blog, focusing on professional topics. Part of the reason I haven’t written anything in a spell is because I’ve been over there.

The program finished in late April, and I spent about three weeks looking for work and continuing to develop new skills. In an amusing series of events, I was offered a job at a health technology start-up as their primary backend engineer. I work for an Israeli named Yaron and help build some software which measures all of your touch-screen typing and runs analysis to detect early symptoms of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. It’s a pretty awesome gig, all things considered, and I’m learning a lot.

I also got in to Columbia! I’ll be starting in the fall part-time in their Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences M.A. My plan is to keep working full-time as a developer for the next year, and to reassess and potentially shift into school full-time in Fall 2015. With my new programming foundation, I think I’ll be a strong candidate for their Data Science concentration, which would be a lot of fun.

So things have come together fairly nicely, considering I had zero clue what was going to happen when I moved to the city in October. It’s nice to have a profession and a specific body of knowledge around which to orient myself. I’ve found it becomes much easier to assign things value, and to organize your thinking and your priorities.

That’s that. Make sure to read the technical blog if you want more insight into what exactly I do these days.