My first name is Gregory. What I like about my name is that it's fairly language agnostic. Of Greek origin, "Γρηγόριος" -- pronounced Grēgorios, meaning "watchful". I can go by: Gregory (English) Gregor (German) Gregorio (Italian/Spanish) Grég (French) Grigorii (Russian) Grzegorz (Polish) Normally, I prefer Greg, Gregor or Grisha (the Russian diminutive of Grigorii) I'm from Johannesburg, where I grew up until I was 18. After that, studies at the University of Maastricht and the Technical University of Munich, both in the computer science department. Some things I've done that I've enjoyed or at least found interesting: - I lived in central China from 18-19, teaching English at TianHua Primary School in Changsha city, Hunan Province. - Studied Artificial Intelligence at Maastricht University, and Data Engineering and Analytics at the Technical University of Munich. - I live in central Amsterdam - Between May 2021 - May 2023, I set up the Data Intelligence CoE for Standard Bank Group, Africa's largest financial institution by assets. The DataInt team was an internal data team for bank-invested fintech startups across SBG's Africa-Regions portfolio. - I like thinking about architecture, urbanism and the design of spaces. I'm writing a book on [Night Club Design](Designed%20for%20Connection.md) - I contributed the neural network training config code to a large art mural on the side of the Tesla GigaFactory facility in Berlin, before the first cars rolled off the line. - I think of travel as a form of education, and do it as often as I can. I record the trips in my [[Travel Globe]] - I feel at my best when I'm in motion, and so for exercise I typically do long distance swimming. I wrote about it in an essay [[Distance swimming]] - Ironically, it was only after I left South Africa (one of the most lexically diverse countries in the world) that I discovered I enjoy learning languages. Since 2019 I've learned Dutch and German from scratch. I'm now learning [[Polish]].