About Me: The Gist

¡Hola 👋🏼!

Mi nombre es Manny. I am a first generation Mexican-American; a proud son of Mexican immigrants. Thanks for swinging by to learn more about me, and my professional passions and personal joys, including my experience with leadership and empowerment, thoughts on AI/ML and other tidbits.

Professional Passion

I have a passion for

Building bridges and community organizing
Creating inclusive, usable, online experiences
Speaking and empowering students, particularly POC
Supporting sustainable initiatives and preserving the one world we all have: Earth.

My aspirations and experiences are not positional: they are experiences that I carry forward to the next opportunity to contribute to meaningful work and interdependent relationships by doing intentional work that inherently has an impact on the lives around me.

See also:

Personal Joys and Commitments

Outside of my professional passions, I enjoy and value a number of things and activities:

Life-long learning
spending quality time with my family, running, and traveling
cooking for others, landscaping my yard, and hosting international students
collaborating with local artists and fighting for social and environmental justice
playing board games -- Scrabble! -- riding my bike, and photographing nature and people

My biggest joy is being a father to my incredible daughter, Nina.

I am conscious about what and where I place my focus on for maximizing my efforts toward helping solve real-world problems.

I embrace and nurture a compassionate, growth mindset; we should never stop the pursuit of learning and growing from one another and our experiences.

See also:

Experience, Leadership, & Empowerment

tl;dr - I'm an ethical technology and inclusion advocate.

I have been fortunate enough to grow into leadership positions in the professional tech world where I recruited, on-boarded, led, coached and mentored happy, productive, inclusive software engineering and design teams made up of individuals of diverse backgrounds. I ensure that everyone on my team is supported in having an intentional learning environment and career pathway for continued advancement and growth.

I leverage my opportunities and privileges in different areas of my life to lift-up and empower people, especially marginalized individuals, to help shape people's experiences and lives for the collective better.

I have also had the pleasure of being an educator, entrepreneur, community space founder, an organizer and activist for social, racial and environmental justice; however, my aspirations and experiences are not positional. “Being a leader, “director”, or an “organizer” in some specific way isn’t the end game for me, or a badge of hubris to wear, although I take humble pride in my work; they're experiences that I carry forward to the next opportunity to contribute to meaningful, interdependent work and equitable relationships.

I believe in speaking my truth in thoughtful and compassionate ways and supporting everyone in doing the same, particularly people of color and other marginalized groups; Representation Matters.

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On Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML)

I am optimistic about the challenges ahead of us, along with the rewards, with the advent of AI/ML. I am also realistically concerned if we don't collectively take proactive steps to prepare for the far reaching impacts AI/ML has on society, such as on individual relevance, economic and social (in)justice, and workforce displacement. There are individuals, groups and other initiatives, like OpenAI, AI Now Institute, Andrew Ng's Deep Learning AI, Meredith Whittaker, and Andrew Yang that are making concious efforts in helping society understand and conscientiously respond to the inevitable transition toward an AI, and generally speaking, automated-leaning society. Check out their work!

See also:

Research - Discriminating Systems: Gender, Race, and Power in AI

Guidance and empathy

I value the on-going guidance of my loving parents and extended family, both in the US and those in Mexico, along with my close friends and selected mentors.

I make a conscious effort to surround myself with people that will push me to continuously learn and grow, with the idea that, I too, am reciprocating the favor in others' constructive self-improvement and growth process.

As I child, I was fortunate enough to have had a range of women and men of color that modeled the importance of compassion, understanding and extending a support base to everyone, as the norm. In looking back at this further, this intentional approach I was taught early on, and have carried with me through adulthood seems to align with what folks refer to as empathy in one form or another. For my siblings, parents and the hard-working immigrant families I grew up with-and-around, we simply knew our acts as doing the right thing, and paying-it-forward to others whenever we could, even if in small ways.

Mindset

I make a conscious effort to surround myself with people that will push me to continuously learn and grow, with the idea that, I too, am reciprocating the favor in others' constructive self-improvement and growth process.

In the grand scheme, we're all a part of the same tribe: Human, each trying to live and do our best in this temporary galaxy ride we call life, so empathetic, compassionate, and interdependent collaboration and cooperation is something I deeply value and practice with the teams I work with and projects I work on.

If you would like to connect with me, feel free to reach out through Twitter-landia, LinkedIn, or even, good ol' fashion email.

Adelante,

Manny

PS - To learn more about how this site is built, and view selected projects and collaborations, visit the meta section.