Introducing my new blog

Hello and welcome to my new tech blog! I'm very new to blogging in general, so please forgive my potentially awkward writing voice as I try to find my feet. I decided to start blogging mainly because I wanted to learn how to implement an MDX-based blog on this newest version of my personal website. It turned out to be significantly more complex than I had expected (maybe I'll write a blog post about that specifically one day?), but I'm happy to say that I've finally gotten it working!

This blog will be a place for me to write about my experiences, showcase my work, and talk about my interests as I learn and grow in my career. The scope of the topics I discuss here will likely shift over time, but I figured a good place to start for my very first post would be to introduce myself. Here goes:

So, Who Is This "Nathan" Guy?

Glad you asked! My name is Nathan and I'm a full-stack dev and machine learning engineer from Barbados 🇧🇧. My tech journey began at McGill University, where I started as an electrical engineering student but quickly found my true calling in computer science and machine learning. After graduating with a B.Eng. in Electrical Engineering, I joined Stocate, a Montreal startup, as a software engineer.

I worked at Stocate for about a year and it was one of the steepest learning curve periods I've ever experienced in my career thus far. We were a small team so I was really able to get my hands dirty with a lot of different technologies. I delivered a complete mobile application for their product, and I contributed heavily to their database, API and website design. My rapid progression at Stocate even led to a brief stint as interim CTO, before I ultimately decided to further my education with a Master's degree in machine learning back at McGill. I'll always be grateful to Stocate for their huge contributions to my learning.

During my Master's, I worked on a Non-Invasive Physical Activity Monitoring System (NiPAMS) project, focusing on machine learning applications to biomedical signal processing. As the lead of the machine learning team, I developed models predicting vital signs with an impressive average accuracy of 92.5%, leading to several academic publications and forming the basis of my thesis.

Now, post completion of my M.Sc., I balance my time between part-time AI/ML consulting, coding personal projects (like this website!), and self-learning to expand my skillset. Outside of my work, I am also immensely passionate about music (I even produce my own!), sports (huge Manchester United fan), and cooking.

What Can You Expect From This Blog?

I don't have a super specific plan in mind for this blog really, I just want to showcase/talk about things that I'm learning or doing in my career. I really like the idea of having a place to document my tech career journey. And who knows, maybe some of the things I write about can help others in their own journeys too. I'm also a big fan of the idea of "learning in public", so I'm hoping that this blog can become a homebase for me to do that.

That said however, I do have a few ideas for some posts that I'd like to write in the near future. Here's a short list of some topics I'm considering writing about:

And there will be more to come. I'm also open to suggestions, so if there's anything you'd like to see me write about, please let me know! You can reach at any of these socials:

Aaaaand that's a wrap for this first post. If you've made it this far, thanks for reading! I hope you'll stick around for more. 😊