Off Hours

I picked up figure skating at Brown and never put it down. I skated with the Figure Skating Club for three years and spent much of that time teaching complete beginners their first laps, which turns out to be the fastest way to relearn a sport yourself.

Scuba diving started during my service years in the Pacific and grew into something more useful than a hobby: hundreds of hours of ocean-cleanup dives, which alongside animal-shelter volunteering added up to an Outstanding Volunteer Service Medal. The ocean is the one place a phone cannot follow you.

I grew up with Spanish, studied Russian seriously enough to make it a degree, and spent a semester in Kazakhstan picking up Kazakh. The habit eventually escaped the classroom: Leksika and Soyle exist because I wanted better vocabulary tools than the ones I could find.

A black belt in the Marine Corps Martial Arts Program, and a couple of years teaching it to other Marines. These days it survives mostly as a warm-up routine and a deep respect for people who fall down well.

Tutoring chemistry, math, and Russian, which I did pro bono through most of my time at Brown, and small builds for their own sake: little websites, odd datasets, tools nobody asked for. Some of them grow up to be real projects. Most of them are just fun.