Nathan Alexander, Founder
My tech education began in 1982 when my parents brought home an IBM clone desktop with 2 floppy drives and an 8088 processor. Kindergartener me read several hundred pages of documentation that came with the computer and learned everything it could do. I was especially interested in playing games, and fixing problems was also super fun. I learned how to reprogram games. Computers were just just something fun to play with, I never thought of making a tech career. I was planning to become a punk-jazz trombonist.
Fast forward to 2006, I was working for an insurance company, and they gave me a desktop computer and asked me to use it for repetitive insurance underwriting work. My childhood programming experience rushed into my mind and I wrote scripts to automate the work as much as possible. Using my scripts I could work up to 24X faster. My script also greatly improved the quality of my work because it could read all policy details and provide detailed explanations to the insurance agents about what their next step was.
I wanted it to go even faster. 24X was the speed limit for one computer. I wanted to break the speed limit so changed my script to run in parallel on more computers, this is called horizontal scaling. When a task is done with horizontal scaling the speed is only limited by the number of computers available. I rewrote my scripts to run as hidden processes in the background of the call center desktops. Since IT wouldn’t let me use a port I wrote my scripts to use text files on file shares to efficiently coordinate the parallel workload. This innovation cleared out a lot of dreary, repetitive work for humans. My department was all caught up and my supervisor came to tell me I was being moved to the “Analytics team”. I said “What’s analytics?”.
During this time I started making friends with great programmers who shared ideas and knowledge with me. I have several important mentors who influenced me deeply and I am very grateful to them. My mentors helped me identify the best computer science topics to self study. I was devouring technical manuals and doing experiments at home to learn this field that was new to me.
This began an 18 year career in Analytics. On my new team I found out I loved forecasting as much as programming. Then I learned that forecasting is also called modeling. People on the internet started calling what I was doing “data science”. I didn’t care what it was called I was just having fun doing it. This was also the time my little family grew. My wife and I had 4 children during this time. I spent these years working, enjoying family life, and self-studying and applying data science. I worked for an insurer, two hospital systems and a drug distributor. My employers loved the work I did for them. Employers couldn’t get enough of me during this time I was awarded dozens of raises and promotions without asking for them. I also received many unsolicited job offers. I was eventually awarded the job title “Senior Data Scientist”.
The 18 year period was good for gaining experience and providing for my family, but I wanted to be an early adopter or inventor. My employers wanted to be late adopters. I really wanted my own lab to design from beginning to end, so I created VERSALEVER, LLC