Today I opened up a new laptop and started to nuke the harddrive. I’m in the process of setting up a decent environment for developing personal tech projects. 

About this time last year, my technical acumen was riding on a few computer science classes in Java and running sluggish batch jobs in Matlab for academic work. I could compare (naively) Mac OS X vs. Windows XP. To me, ‘sudo’ had no meaning and a server was a nebulous concept. I had just graduated with an engineering degree but I was in desperate need of hard skills. I started reading up and playing around with different tools beyond my tiny pool.

Eventually, I got hired by a startup with one the best, if not the best data stacks for social media in New York. Instantly I became part of the NY tech startup community — thus, I was surrounded by inspiring people, some of which have become close friends. It was now my job to wield relational databases daily and build systems to mine our data, some facing the clients who use our app. 

This blog will be a repository of notes on what I’m doing when I tell my friends i’m ‘chillaxing’ in my or [one of the couple of friends I will probably mention]’s apartment… it will also be a place to write about my experiences in tech IRL. I’m Cherie. Welcome to my world…