What I do
I build full-stack web apps and business websites. While I work on a wide range of projects, my specialty is coding natural language processing (NLP) web applications in Python using the Django framework. My regular clients are in a diverse range of industries, from automotive (e.g. Daimler AG, Continental) to astral projection. I enjoy concentrating on basics with small businesses to build a solid foundation, as well as working with large corporations on highly specialized tasks. For example, I work as a linguist on quality control for Google from time to time.
My first love in computing was frontend development, and nothing is more fun for me than whipping up a page in HTML5 using a pinch of PHP, leavening it with Bootstrap, and spicing it up with JavaScript. I really enjoy consulting with small businesses on optimizing WordPress sites.
How I got here
I stepped into and discovered my passion for natural language processing (NLP) while working as a linguist and localization engineer preparing Ukrainian-English bilingual corpora to update technical standards for Germany’s Daimler AG and train neural machine translation engines for US defense contractor Raytheon.
The transition from linguist to localization engineer took place with the increasing sophistication of computer aided translation (CAT) processes over my decade criss-crossing the Atlantic translating into my native language of English from Polish and Russian, and later, from Lemko Carpatho-Rusyn and Ukrainian.
I graduated from Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland after completing my studies as a Russian major there and at Georgetown University in Washington DC.
Who I am
I hail from Annapolis, Maryland, a town sandwiched between Washington DC and Baltimore made famous by the Naval Academy and crabs. I grew up in an interesting, rural part of South Maryland comprising tobacco farms dotted with fishing hamlets along the Chesapeake Bay.
Being a third-generation hyphenated American, half my ancestors came to America at the turn of the century from the Ruthenian Hungary-Poland frontier milieu made famous by distant relation Andy Warhol, who quipped “I come from nowhere.” My other half is of Irish-German extraction, with no provable relation to Jackie Gleason, unfortunately.
Hobbies include watching Cyberpunk classics like Blade Runner and The Matrix, as well as the 90s sitcom Friends in Hungarian and the 70s Soviet film Solaris in Russian. I dabble in Sanskrit and yoga when I get a chance. I like working out, which means sprints, high-intensity interval training (HIIT), and lifting when I can, and when I’m on the road, it’s all about streetworkouts.