Personal

I'm Talgat — Tal, to most people. A Londoner.

Before tech, the path took its time. I studied linguistics, taught languages, and worked as an interpreter. I ran a small e-commerce business. I worked in marketing operations and nonprofit administration. Then I went back to school for software engineering — three years of full-time work at Frito-Lay alongside it. The schedule was extreme. I still can't quite believe I made it through. Different industries, one instinct underneath: figure out how something works, then make it work better.

London is where my daughter was born — she's two and a half, the centre of our world. I've been taking her out since she was a baby; we go to parks and ice cream shops and quiet corners of the city. This is where she's growing up, and where I want to keep building things.

I currently drive a delivery route for Frito-Lay, and the route has turned into a few hours a day of listening to lectures and podcasts — usually Open Yale Courses. Kagan's Greek History stayed with me; Shiller's Financial Markets did too. Lately I've been working through ESRI podcasts — Geographical Thinking and Spatial Reports. The bikeability project idea came from one of those episodes. I'd rather a lecture or a podcast than music, almost always.

I enjoy cooking a lot — forty dishes by now, give or take, ten of which I made up. Espresso is non-negotiable. I used to coach fitness on the side, back in school. For some reason I once took a flying lesson and learned that I find flying boring, which surprised me. Long road trips are my favourite kind of trip — Calgary to London once, and Medebach to Hamburg out to Ærø Island in Denmark on our honeymoon.

I read in several languages, mostly non-fiction — history, rhetoric, grammar, and logic. Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book is the one I keep coming back to. It changed how I read everything else. Aristotle's Rhetoric in the everyday-readers edition is one I return to often, along with texts on logical fallacies and Geoff Colvin's Talent is Overrated. I keep a stack of the Oxford Very Short Introductions for when I want a quick foothold in a new subject.

Builder by temperament. Lifelong learner, but specifically — I follow the why of things. I want to understand systems, not just operate them. That's the through-line, I think.