Hello! My name is Misha Golubitsky.

2022

I ran out of space on SoundCloud so I setup an account on https://hearthis.at/golubitsky/.

2018 (or so)

Welcome to my blog about learning machine learning and data science; and about music and also generally about anything I resonate with. Check out my résumé.

I was born in St. Petersburg and I grew up in Boston. I played piano, trombone, and composed music. Then I became a recording engineer. I recorded the music of Mahler (who later became, and remains to this day, my favorite composer) performed by an orchestra with a leading American conductor at the helm, and a cool fusion jazz band in LA.

In 2014, I felt like… there was something out there… so I left LA. I left my recording career behind, moved to San Francisco, attended App Academy, and became a software engineer. As a software engineer I’ve enjoyed being humbled by my colleagues, striving to write beautiful code, writing tests first, and generally thinking differently than before. Here’s a fun Maze Generator & Solver I made a while back.

After working for a few years as a software engineer in SF I wrapped up my affairs there and left to travel in Nepal and in India, along the way trekking in the Everest region (I first hiked in “serious” mountains while I was a recording engineer intern at the Aspen Music Festival in Colorado), volunteering at a school on the outskirts of Kathmandu, Nepal to teach computer science to children – some of whom don’t even have a computer at home, and later visiting the place where Buddha became enlightened, where I attended the in-person teachings of H.H. The Dalai Lama and shook hands with a monk who, having walked some 2000 kilometers, had arrived there on foot from Thailand. My Western notions of “Asian mysticism” regularly clashed with the hyper-commercialism and Westernization I observed throughout my travels. I also found the most interesting book I’ve read in years.

Even during my time in India I was already studying machine learning – at a hostel with high-speed internet access, where I ended up staying long enough to observe a surreal kite festival: throughout the day kites are flown and at dusk fireworks and lanterns light up the sky, sent up from rooftops all across the city, families eating street food together, the air giddy and effervescent.

During 4 months of traveling I realized that I didn’t feel much like physically traveling anymore, so much as like continuing to learn about ML. I believe we’re on the cusp of some massive changes that will be brought about by the continuously-increasing processing power and better and more-accurate models of the world, and I want to be on the engineering side of that evolution.