Hello, I am Nico!

Welcome to my website. The content here is centered around computing, math, stats, philosophy, and history.

My technical interests span systems programming, distributed systems, and statistical computing. I work with C, Rust, Go, and Python for backend systems, and TypeScript when building user interfaces. I'm particularly drawn to data infrastructure problems: optimizing query engines, building distributed data pipelines, and implementing statistical algorithms that scale. The goal is making these complex systems simple for the people using them.

Studies

I am a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, majoring in Computer Science and Data Science. I spend most of my time hanging out in the Undergraduate Projects Lab on campus with my friends.

Here is a list of some of my favorite classes:

• Theory of Multi-agent Machine Learning (Manolis Vlatakis)
• Game Theory, Learning and Optimization (Manolis Vlatakis)
• Data Exploration, Cleaning, and Integration for Data Science (AnHai Doan)
• Statistical Data Visualization (Kris Sankaran)
• Intro to Operating Systems (Michael Swift)
• Intro to Big Data Systems (a.k.a. Intro to Distributed Systems) (Tyler Caraza-Harter)

Writing

I try to stay away from being prescriptive and instead prefer to frame my experiences and how I've learned or grown from them. I focus on my interests in programming, statistics, psychology, philosophy, and history, and that's what I write about.

I am forever learning, and formulating my interests and perspective in essays allows me to refine my beliefs and understanding. I am always open to critiques, fact checking, or revising to cover angles I did not anticipate. Reach me at nico[at]salm[dot]dev!

Colophon

A colophon is a brief statement that appears at the end of a book, providing information about its production. I got the idea from Andrew, and while I don't believe I will do as great a job as he did with his, here is my best shot:

The site is intentionally minimal, built with HTML/CSS, a build.sh script, and Pandoc for processing Markdown. No JavaScript except for conditional MathJax loading on posts with LaTeX. The build process includes font subsetting with pyftsubset to include only used characters, significantly reducing file sizes. No analytics, no cookies, no tracking. Just words on a screen. I've enjoyed building from scratch—it forces me to really consider what I actually want.

For those interested, the website source is available here.

If you'd like to link back to my site, feel free to use my 88x31 button—a nod to the early web:

<a href="https://salm.dev" target="_blank"><img src="https://salm.dev/88x31.gif" alt="salm.dev"></a>