NOAH
JACOBS
HACKING
"Wasting programmer time is the true inefficiency, not wasting machine time."
- Paul Graham
I am a programmer without formal education. I’ve been lucky to work with and learn from people more experienced than myself; I’ve also been lucky in the sense that I am a relatively quick learner.
Age 21 - Took EECs 183, the intro coding class at the University of Michigan | Managed the creation of some programmatic tools for investing–this was not me coding myself, but my forced use of terminal was a gateway drug | Wrapped a google sheet with a script to alert me when it was someone’s bday | Scraped a few sites, like FINRA
Age 22 - More scraping | Used genetic algos to optimize a trading strategy within a monte carlo simulation I made | Wrote scripts to monitor, process, and summarize 8-K’s & earnings calls for publicly traded companies | Contributed to and used some prompt benchmarking suites for A/B testing of content generation
Age 23 - Lots of API wrappers for a sales intelligence platform | Selenium test suite for the same | This site
I haven’t yet added a whole lot of content to the left column yet, but stay tuned for more.
Last Updated 2024.08.25
This Website
I made this website using Clojure, HTML, CSS, and a sprinkle of JS (note that the box serving this content disappears if there is nothing in it).
The site is about as simple on the backend as it looks on the front end; there is one html template that is injected with content based on the path and then delivered to the user’s browser. You can either type the path manually in the url above, or use the buttons on the site to automatically change the path, and thus, the contents. If the path doesn’t represent content I have, you are sent back to the home page.
The choice of backend language is quite unconventional. I wanted to code something in a dialect of lisp, and first played around with Hy and Arc before settling on Clojure . Lisp's innate recursion was useful for my WordPiece tokenizer.
The project also served as a CSS and design crash course for me, as well.
The first draft took me a couple of days, including the design and writing the site specific content. Since then, I've added some features, such as the persistent blog subscription bar.
Originally Published: 2024.06.08; Updated 2024.07.17