About Me

I am a software engineer at Wave. I’m excited by the power of software, and I want to bring that power to people who are currently less well served by it.

I graduated from MIT in 2013 with a bachelors degree in Computer Science and a minor in Math. While there I helped organize Splash, and as an alum I have volunteered for Learning Unlimited to help spread Splash beyond MIT.

I love folk music (fiddle, singing) and dance (contra, English, waltz, rapper). Some specific affiliations:

You can hear some of my music on my Youtube Channel

Writings

I infrequently write new things, but here are my favorite blog posts, preserved for posterity.

Contra Dance Bookings and Gender

I promised a while ago I would write a post analyzing gender in the context of contra dance bookings. This post keeps that promise. I was hoping to be able to draw more interesting conclusions, but alas, my dataset was too small to do so with any confidence.

Read on →

Who gets booked in the Bay Area, Callers Edition

In which I comment on who was booked to call Bay Area contra dances in 2013 and 2014. Read on →

Who Gets Booked in the Bay Area, Music Edition

I recently spent roughly 20 hours on airplanes had time to take on a silly useless project. So I took all of the Bay Area contra dance schedules for the last two years, converted the information into csv format, and made pretty pictures of the results. Since there’s a lot of stuff there, I’m commenting on music related things in this post. I will comment more in future posts.

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More Discoveries about Listening

It’s been a bit more than a year since I’ve been thinking about how to listen better. It’s hard to attribute any particular successful conversation to the things I’ve learned, but I haven’t been afraid that I’m dominating a conversation as often, and I’ve had some good successes learning interesting things from other people, and I have been able to help friends who needed to get something off their chest, and done a good job. That being said, I still think I have a ton of space to improve, and my successes are disproportionately with people who seem to like talking anyway.

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Gender Free Dancing is for Everyone

In which I discuss why even straight people benefited when Berkeley's previously gendered contra moved to gender-role-free language. Read on →

Learning to Listen

I’ve noticed particular people being good at listening, both in very casual and very personal situations. I am not one of these people, but would like to become one. I’ve asked some people what they do and I’ve done some practicing and this is what I’ve learned so far.

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