About

Portrait of Mark van der Broek

Mark van der Broek

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I like turning messy real-world questions into models, code, and explanations that people can actually use.

This site is my working bookshelf: a place for technical notes, patient write-ups, and the occasional side quest that starts small and gets surprisingly interesting.

What you’ll find here

  • Practical writing about operations research, data science, and machine learning
  • Some thoughts about AI and how it affects the job of programmers
  • Sometime interesting projects that popped up

History

At the age of 12 I discovered the fun of programming by making small hobby websites using HTML, CSS, and PHP. During my undergraduate degree in Econometrics and Operations Research I found my love for modeling real-world problems in applications like finance, actuarial science, logistics, and data analytics.

I quickly realized that becoming fluent in languages like Python, R, and C++ was fundamental for applying these mathematical models in practice. That led me to an extra-curricular C++ programming course by Frank Brokken and Jurjen Bokma. More recently, with the increasing popularity of machine learning and deep learning, I started following the hands-on fast.ai course.

If you’d like the best way into the site, start with the blog, then wander through the projects. If you need my full resume, please send me an email.