Brendan Sudol
July 2012

Hello humans

Greetings, world (or the 7 people who end up seeing this). I’m Brendan and I’m excited to be here. After a couple false starts, I’m going to try again to get serious about blogging.

I know blogs need to be watered frequently and get proper sunlight to flourish, and I’m going to try hard to give this the TLC it deserves. And I feel like there are a lot of cool stuff happening in my life these days which will give me some good material. For one, I recently started working on the data/analytics team at Etsy, an online marketplace for unique things, and I’m absolutely loving it. I’m also continuing to learn and get better at programming – ruby (and rails) and, more recently, javascript and d3.js, are the languages and frameworks I’ve been spending the most time with. And on top of that, I live in NYC and I’m lucky enough to see and do some awesome stuff in the city.

A few other facts about me which will surely permeate into future posts:

  • I’m an avid golfer. I love the game and try to play as often as I can. I also enjoy playing tennis and basketball, and I’m now getting really into ping pong. I may or may not have actually taken an hour-long ping pong lesson last weekend :)
  • I get inappropriately excited about cool data visualizations, like this, this, and this, and love applying similar techniques to Etsy data.
  • I’m from Virginia and went to UVA for college, and miss the southern hospitality that was so common down there. Is it me, or is niceness suspicious in NYC?
  • I studied math and economics in college and came out of school doing consulting. It was a good experience and I’m sure I’ll write about it sometime, but I couldn’t be happier switching gears to the tech sector. It’s so different, and so much better, and I can’t see myself ever leaving this space.

Another reason why I’m excited about this new blog is the software I’m using to power it. It’s called Jekyll, a “simple, blog aware, static site generator” built by Github cofounder, Tom Preston-Werner. It’s incredibly flexible and customizable – I have complete control over the structure and style, so get excited for constant tinkering. And I can write my posts in Markdown with my favorite text editor, and it converts it automatically into pretty HTML, with everything backed up on Github. If you’re interested in learning more about Jekyll, check out Tom’s blog post about it, or take a look at other sites that use it.

Can’t wait to write and share more soon.