Welcome back to a special episode of the weekly newsletter. This week will be a review of my time on planet Earth, some lessons, observations, and general thoughts having spent just over 30 years here so far. Lets get into it.
There's not much to say about the 0-10 year range, like many humans I was functionally useless during this time period, and with an underdeveloped frontal lobe it was a daily struggle just to maintain any sort of schedule, let alone complete higher order tasks like academic research. That said it was one of the simpler time periods of my life. No tax residency calculations, no concerns around supply chain stability and global economic forecasting, just the Simpsons and the occasional news that I didn't really understand at the time. The death of Princess Diana, 9/11, the Second Gulf War, the Yugoslav Wars, the founding of YouTube, Facebook, Google, and more.
Like many teenagers who would go on to study computer science (although I didn't know it at that time), I spent most of this time playing World of Warcraft, Minecraft, and the Call of Duty franchise. I did the minimum possible at school to get good grades whilst spending the maximum amount of time possible playing video games. I did however make a great decision towards the end of this decade to independently study C#, a programming language from the Microsoft universe using the C# Yellow Book by Rob Miles. Little did I know I'd end up meeting Rob and sitting his Programming 101 exam at the start of my first year at university as a way to prove my proficiency and thereby move up one year from the foundation programme (after absolutely bombing my A-Levels).
As a part of this move I cut a deal with Dr Mike Brayshaw (then admissions tutor for computer science at Hull) that in return I would become the best student in the department, a tall order with the entry requirements for the course being A/A/B and my results being C/C/D. But, it turned out well in the end. With the first few semesters behind me I successfully applied for a research internship in the department and began work on lots of extra curricular research from computer graphics to cybersecurity, and then to logistics and supercomputation. By the third year I'd covered a lot of different topics and finished with an undergraduate thesis on cybersecurity.
With a reasonable understanding of the world of academic research, I started my PhD at Hull immediately after finishing my BSc, with a focus on complex systems - a branch of physics/computer science focussed on understanding emergent phenomena through computational modelling (simplified). In this first year I meticulously studied roughly 20 textbooks cover to cover on this and adjacent topics, including The Computational Beauty of Nature, The Statistical Mechanics of Financial Markets, An Introduction to Spatial Econometrics, and more. The reading was naturally taking a financial turn, so when some organisational changes happened at Hull and I found myself on a different PhD program this time at the Univesity of York, I turned even further in that direction. At the time (2018 ish) the perfect scientific petri dish of complex financial systems was starting to gain popularity - cryptocurrencies.
So that's how I landed on doing analytics on cryptocurrency transaction data, after which some offers came in for jobs in the hedge fund world in London. Although my skillset put me squarely in line for a then limited number of cryptocurrency quantitative research roles, I instead wanted to leave the crypto space entirely (studying something for years can have that effect), so joined Squarepoint as a Data Engineer. One year of that and I moved into Data Operations, and one year after that I joined Vitol. After a further year in Vitol I moved to their Data Science team, and resigned 6 months later, leaving London and the finance world entirely.
As you know if you've read a few of these newsletters, since then I've lived in France, Vietnam, Malaysia, Georgia, and Bulgaria, trying out different things, researching different things, and figuring out what the next move should be.
So here we are, three decades deep with some great experiences, a few failed relationships, and an uncertain road ahead.
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