Welcome. If you didn't land here by mistake, you're probably looking for my hacks page. The rest of this site is mostly boring chatter about myself.
I'm part of the founding team of BigML, a little startup trying to apply machine learning and other AI techniques to big data, and make them accessible to non-specialists. It took a while, but i'm finally able to make my own mistakes.
I was hacking for Oblong from 2008 to early 2011. Before that, i worked for Google (from July 2007).
From June 2005 to May 2007, i worked on embedded software development for the scientific payload of LISA Pathfinder. Here's a short article and here a blog entry i wrote describing our work in that project.
See my resume for my whole professional story (and some other bits).
I was a theoretical physicist in a previous life, and wrote a Ph. D. thesis on gravitational wave detectors. I also got a bachelor's degree in computer science. Between 2003 and 2005, i taught courses on programming and computer networks at the Universitat Autònoma of Barcelona, where i was part of the mobile agents research group (and collaborated in an article or two).
I spend most of my spare time reading, learning about programming languages and hacking.
You can read more about my ancient adventures in my old blogs: programming musings, minor emacs wizardry, and physics musings. For silliness in small doses, nothing better than my twitter account. But, if i were you, i'd rather visit more interesting sites.
Most people, including my students and friends but not my parents, call me jao, which is also my unix user name of old. It sounds, in Spanish, very close to the English word how.
In other circles, i'm also known as José Antonio Ortega Ruiz. Quite a mouthful, and rather boring. Just for the record, we Spaniards use two surnames. So, the correct English version of my official id would run along the lines of José A Ortega-Ruiz.
You can reach me at (@ jao (or (. pobox com) (. gnu org))).
GPG key (Fingerprint: A247 C478 0736 A615 6BC8 DA74 8C08 1D34 D321 D881)