Hi and welcome to my site! I'm Nate Jones, formerly from Seattle where I started my career in data, but now residing in Muncie, Indiana. Becoming a data professional wasn't a part of a dream of mine, rather something I discovered along the way and found that I really enjoyed the work. I first began working with data back in 2017 when my boss was wanting to establish a data program for our smallish startup restaurant group. We had a couple books on SQL lying around, and a choice of BI tools and warehousing solutions. After a few years of wearing the IT & data hats, I came to realize data was the best fit for me.
As for who I am more personally, the personality type I've been assigned is the architect, although no assignment can perfectly define an individual, I do love to plan and build, to look at things wholistically but also at their most granular points, and I enjoy the nuance because I'm naturally super-curious. I think it's most appropriate to say that I feel more of a need than a want to know the inner workings of any object, idea, construct, or technology I encounter, and I've always been that way, even as a kid disassembling my toys or the home computer (in secret). And I enjoy building things, real world or digitally. Over the years I've found myself working many hands-on projects with car mechanics, rocketry, sound isolation, and other odd projects like a for-no-good-reason laser array, or projects like buying software from the 90's to then attempt to run on modern platforms with VMs.
I'm also a musician and artist. When I was 17, I won a national Scholastic Art award where I was presented my medal of honor at Carnegie Hall, an experience I'll always remember. But music is my greatest passion, having participated in everything from classical guitar ensembles to heavy rock jam sessions to acoustic folk sets at coffee houses, I'm most fulfilled with music in my life.
All in all, I have one of those whole-brain personalities that draws me into projects and experiences of all sorts. In college I majored in creative writing where I found my love for creative non-fiction, an exercise in viewing reality through many different facts, paradigms, philosophies, and creative thought to discover a more complex essence of life, learning in reverence from authors like Annie Dillard, but I also followed my curiosity to participate in an array of STEM courses where I studied plant and animal biology and chemistry, participating in exciting projects like PCR (polymerase chain reaction) to duplicate strands of my own DNA, as well as projects like extracting vitamin C from citrus fruits or calculating the population density of ants in a given field, and I enjoy having this diversity of knowledge and experience that gives me the opportunity to see things from many different perspectives, something I consider invaluable.
If you'd like to get to know me more or to reach out for a professional inquiry, please send me a message through my contact page or email me directly at nate@datahead.me.
