About

The title of the blog, Optimistic Nihilism is my perspective; it's all meaningless, but since we're here, we may as well enjoy it. 

Hi, I'm Nelson! 

I live in California with my wife Yao.

I grew up mainly in Ontario and Michigan, then went to the University of Michigan, graduated with dual degrees in Business: Finance and Electrical Engineering. After college, I moved to NYC, where I was a "technical consultant" aka "forward deployed engineer" aka "solutions architect" for a really fun company called Eccella, where I travelled around and pretended to be an experienced professional. 

After a couple years, I wanted a change, so with some friends' and mainly my brother Angus's help, I taught myself more programming, and got a job at a cyber security startup called Allure. There, I worked as a full stack engineer on document exfiltration tracking software, as well as revamping the front end. 

After Allure ran out of money, and I was axed in the process, I left NYC and moved out to the Bay Area to work for Amazon on the Music Search team. At Amazon Music I have been working on distributed systems, building software that serves a high volume of traffic at low latency. 

My professional interests include search, performance optimization, representation learning, embeddings, and more recently, Rust.