How Twitter Shaped My Life

This post is a bit of a departure from my usual technical content. Recently I found myself in the replies of a tweet from Visakan VeerasamyVisa (@visakanv on Twitter) is one of the most interesting people I follow. He has a keen ability for discussing human behavior and emotions in a way that almost always resonates with me. Go check him out!

, once again discussing how influential Twitter has been for me. I received this reply that surprised me a bit:

My initial thought was something along the lines of “is this really exceptional or interesting enough to deserve a blog post”? It’s pretty common that people find jobs, community, and even love on Twitter, right? I’m probably not enough of an outlier to warrant discussing at length. But then I decided to shift my perspective a bit. How many times have I given advice to a student to go be active on Twitter? In contrast, how many times have people that I know in real life been surprised to hear how important I consider Twitter to be for my professional growth? I realized pretty quickly that within the circle of people that I know in the flesh, I am probably the only one with this relationship to Twitter, so I decided to take up this reply and write a bit about my experienceThe irony that this will most likely be seen by Twitter users is not lost on me.

.

I first made a Twitter account in college (ten years ago now!) but only started seriously using it in a professionally relevant way when I started my masters program back in 2019. The first point that seems obvious to a certain flavor of Twitter user but perhaps not to those outside is that nearly every mildly technical niche and research area has a highly active corner of Twitter. For the longest time, when I would open Twitter, the only posts that I would see were from math professors and programmers. They share their latest research papers, what languages they’re experimenting with, what math puzzles are currently on their mind. It may seem redundant to describe in today’s world, but even online I’ve never had another place where I could have near instant access, response, and alignment with such technical people. Even at universities, there is a social dynamic that can create distance. This doesn’t exist online, and there is simply a wider net to cast in terms of finding someone that lies within a niche that interests you.

So now that the stage is set a bit, let’s fast forward to the summer of 2020. I had just finished my masters degree in business analytics at UT Austin. By all accounts I had a successful year, my classmates had even selected me for the annual academic excellence award and then… the pandemic hit and suddenly I found myself in a much rougher job market. I was quickly burning through the small amount of money I had left, and had no idea what was next. That was actually how this website started, with the first blog post being about a week after my graduation! With the benefit of hindsight, I can see how valuable this time was. It gave me a small breather to decompress, to collect my thoughts both personally and technicallyAs an example, I wrote this long article What is Regression? during this time. While today I might rephrase a few things, it remains one of my favorite things that I’ve written and was very important for collecting my thoughts on the subject.

after a stressful year. During this time was when I made my first inroads into functional programming, and started my slow march towards programming languages research.

But before any of that, I needed to find a job! About two months into my spell of unemployment, along came this relatively innocuous tweet:

At the time, I didn’t even follow Colm on Twitter. There’s really not that much detail in the tweet either. The location and company didn’t even make it into the body, but a follow-up reply hours later. I knew though the reason that I was seeing this tweet was because of the disproportionate numbers of math professors that I follow on Twitter, so I took it seriously. I tracked down his contact info (I recall this being harder than you’d expect of a professor) and sent him an email the next morning. Within a day I had received a phone call from my future manager. It was just the foot in the door to a difficult interviewing process, but even here my online presence was relevant. One of the senior managers (a math PhD) grilled me over my post about the Basel problem. I later learned that one of the reasons that I was given an interview in the first place was because of the Project Euler solutions I had written in Haskell and written a blog post about.

I moved to Atlanta to join one of Bank of America’s quantitative finance groups, and quickly realized that Twitter and my tiny blog had opened up a world of possibility for me. A world where my bonus checks were more money than than my parents made in a year. A world where most of time I had free reign to pick my projects, to start initiatives, to write software that touched literal millions of dollars. And in some sense it was as simple as that, being in the right place at the right time, with someone willing to give a chance to someone like me that might as well have been from off the street. An amusing follow up is this exchange that happened just after I accepted an offer:

Over the next few years of working, I stayed “active” on Twitter. I use scare quotes here because my definition of active is something more akin to what most people would call lurking. While I loved my time at Bank of America, even from the onset I knew that I intended to return for my PhD. At the tail end of my masters I had just discovered functional programming through Haskell, and slowly my Twitter feed became more populated with PL researchers than math professors. I had very little formal CS educationI was a math major as an undergraduate, and distinctly remember the pain of taking and nearly failing a C++ class my sophomore year. Not much stuck!

, and so over about three years I spent my days writing financial code and my nights and weekends slowly learning about type systems and proof assistants. Without Twitter, I doubt that I would have so quickly found such a fitting research area.

And when it was time to apply to PhD programs, naturally the first place I went to organize my thoughts was Twitter. If I remember correctly, at one point I literally went peron by person through my following list to make sure I wasn’t forgetting any potential advisors. In the spirit of Twitter serendipity, I ran across this tweet:

Again, this wasn’t a person I was even following. I wasn’t familiar with the professor or their institution, but the content was interesting. I hadn’t been actively searching for something that intersected with linguistics, but I was curious. I took the time to look through the paper they suggested and found it interesting. I looked at their website and found a compelling and detailed page for prospective students that instantly signaled to me that this was someone that I wanted to work with. And again, Twitter was my foot in the door. Perhaps not in the same sense as when I was job searching in that any barrier to entry was removed, but the much more subtle obstacle of opening my eyes to a good option that I would not have previously known even existed. I again packed up everything and moved across the country to Philadelphia with Colin as my PhD advisor.

All together, counting my time at Bank of America and the next few years I’ll be working on my PhD, there is a total of almost a decade of major career events that I can directly attribute to Twitter, and a far more profound impact on my technical development. And again, I’d like to emphasize that I’m not a big account. I’m not even a medium sized account! I don’t post much, and for the first few years I didn’t even reply to people very often. But just by being in the right place, surrounding myself with people doing work that I thought was interesting, all of these options and information revealed themselves to me. I can’t think of a single other resource with more significance to my career development.