About

About the Website

These pages contain scattered thoughts on many topics I cared about enough to write about them and publish them online.

It doesn't have any particular structured or theme, but feel free to explore. I hope you find something that resonates with you.

About Me

I am currently living in Barcelona, Spain, and working as a data scientist at Adevinta in the experimentation team. Before that, I lived in Helsinki, Finland for about 3 years. I grew up in Belgrade, Serbia and spent most of my life there.

I used to like writing when I was a kid, but I was too lazy to work on it and too afraid to put myself out. So I choose to go to an electrotechnical high school with a focus on computer science. I met with programming for the first time there, but I wasn't very interested. In fact, I didn't like school at all. I felt stupid most of the time and didn't have a clue why I have to spend all this time sitting in a bench.

Somewhere in the second half of my high school days, a book called The Process from Franz Kafka dropped into my hands, and something clicked after this. I started reading anything that I could get my hands on. So while I was studying computer science, I spent most of my time reading classics.

When time came for university, I took a U-turn and went to linguistics and literature studies. Literature took me to philosophy, which took me to the ancient Pythagoreans, Plato, Aristotle and Descart, and this took me back to mathematics and science. The ideas of the past, slowly forming the shapes of knowledge that we have today, revealed that there is an evolving world out there to be lived and explored. I liked linguistics and was very interested, but there was something about formal education that just didn't go with me. So around the second half of my studies, history repeated itself - while I was studying linguistics and literature, I spent most of my time doing math and learning software development.

I ended up in data science by studying natural language processing - often attending lessons outside my university, doing many online courses and reading classical and popular books on statistics. I owe my education to this age of ours, where I could explore freely and let my curiousity run loose. One example of a rule I followed in the early days was very simple - get a curriculum online on an area from a prestige university, then get a list of books they recommend or links to online videos if they have them. Then just go for the books and courses that make your heart pump faster. I guess this became natural to me, because I skipped a lot of lectures, both in high-school and university, so I anyway had to learn on my own.

Eventually I got an internship, and then a job and then dropped out from my studies, having only a couple of exams left. I might return to that one day, who knows.

My time at the university wasn't wasted, though. My love for literature has remained. My love for linguistics remained too. For a while, I had a big crush on Noam Chomsky, especially his ideas of a universal grammar. I believe my love for simplicity comes from him and the idea of the universal grammar - there exist simple rules and principles common to all human languages and embedded in the wiring of our brain, that generate all possible languages, sentences and meanings that we can create. The idea of emergent complexity from simple rules is still keeping me awake at night.

So here I am today. I still jump from topic to topic, but I tend to have a bit more structure and direction. I like science, and especially like studying physics. I like statistics and machine learning, and I'm deeply interested in studies of causality. I dance bachata and salsa, enjoy hiking and travelling. I like long walks, and I still enjoy getting lost in a book.

If you ever want to chat, feel free to write me up!