About

I live in the rainy/sunny mountains of Puerto Rico with my wife, our 4-year-old son and 1-year-old daughter. We live in the house where my wife grew up, the house that her uncle built, section by section, as abuela was able to save up money from her job managing the local school cafeteria. We are slowly and painstakingly evicting the ghosts who live there, but that's a story for another day.

When I’m not running after the kids, you’ll usually find me in my garden, tending to my lettuce greens, pruning back my tomato plants, and praying to finally grow just one sweet cantaloupe, for crying out loud.

Most of my career has been spent in nonprofit work, helping people organize for justice and build power through collective action. In my current role at my current organization, I serve as the finder, keeper and presenter of information, whether that involves research and crafting strategic reports for our campaigns, designing and administering our membership database, or employing our member relations management system. I stumbled into this role by necessity, not design.

For a long time, the computer was just the box I used to write reports and surf the web. Until I got fed up with how messy our membership database was. Knowing nothing about data architecture, I taught myself enough to rebuild our database in Airtable. When I ran up against Airtable's limitations, I dug deeper: taught myself database design and T-SQL, migrated our data to Azure SQL, and built a CRUD app with Power Apps that even our most tech-innocent organizers could use to track and report their fieldwork. Then I started learning Python to scrape, clean, and analyze data from the web. I got to a level where I could fetch and analyze data, but my scripts were brittle and narrow in scope, like the marigolds and zinnias in my garden. My next step is to take the giant leap from knowing the datatypes, functions and methods to understanding how to write robust, professional-level programs that will endure like perennials.

In addition, I've recently discovered an abiding love for the elegance of lower-level computing processes. As I develop my data engineering skills to make a deeper impact for my organization, I’m also delving into the basics of how a computer works.

I've started this blog to help process and document my learnings, and to give friends, peers, and advisors a window into what I'm up to. I'll also post about my inner life, because, well, like you, I'm a full human being, and how I feel and think has a lot to do with how I program.

That’s what I’m up to.
Thank you for stopping by.
You are welcome here.