Hi! I’m Kai. I work as a Data Engineer, which is a very specialized software engineering that writes code to replicate and ingest data, transforms data semantically,  orchestrates repeated processes, and provides the DevOps/SysAdmin support and automation for all those activities. I am a recovering product manager. My academic background is in literature, especially the transatlantic 18th and 19th century sort, and medieval literature. My enrollment in the Digital Humanities program is done in the spirit of mashing up my technical skills and humanistic topics of inquiry.

In general, if any project group wants an opinion on tradeoffs between multiple technical solutions, I’m happy to provide it, as I’m generally literate in this way. Throwing that out there.

Design/UX: This realm is not really my strong suit. I would not enjoy contributing to this facet of a project.

Development: I’m a SQL expert. Although I consider myself a hacker, I can write professional data pipelines in Python (and on the JVM), and have orchestration experience with Apache Airflow to refresh and ingest new data from defined sources, and monitor that process. Fairly decent at scrapping data from API/websites too. I am interest in expanding my skills in two areas if the project I’m on allows for it:

1. Text analysis/natural language processing, including sentiment analysis, topic modeling, word2vec and potentially machine learning to aid in the above, that would be something I’d like to help with. Python (e.g Gensim) for medium to large corpora, or Scala (e.g. Spark) for very large corpora (unlikely I think for these semester projects I think).
2. I’ve had a recent but abiding interest in learning Ruby on Rails 7 because of its reemphasis solo developer web applications and quick time from idea to prototype. It would also be entirely new to me. If you’re project needs more features and flexibility than what CBOX offers, let’s discuss.

Documentation: I love reading and writing documentation. I’d be happy doing this for almost any project or subject matter.

Outreach: I do not have an active social media presence, having deleted my accounts years ago. That said, if it benefits the project and there’s no one suitable to do the work, I’m fine helping out in this way. Just don’t expect a large network to come in tow.

Project management: I have quite a bit of professional experience in this for go-to-market and software projects. If it’s important to track project status, I can help out in a pragmatic way by adding just enough process to help out teammates and throw off enough info to report how the project is coming along. I don’t particularly want to do this, but it’s fine if it helps out the team I’m on.

Research: I would like to become better at this. I can use Google, and backtrace through bibliographies and works cited. But I’m fuzzy on resources, and I’ve never engaged the GC library, so I feel a bit behind and rusty in terms of my research skills.