Paddy Horan
Paddy Horan

Technology Lead, Actuarial and R&D

About

Welcome to my website. This site is mostly a brain dump of things I don’t want to forget or explorations into things I find interesting.

In my day job I am an Actuary (FSA) at Assured Allies where we are trying to reshape how and where people age. I am a Tech Lead responsible for our Actuarial Technologies and other projects in our R&D department. At this point in my career I would describe myself as a “non-traditional” Actuary, I enjoy bridging the gap between Actuarial Science and emerging areas of technology, in particular, my areas of interest below.

I am a committer to the Apache Arrow project and enjoy contributing to open source (though I don’t have as much time for this these days).

The name of this blog is derived from my increasing explorations into technology, and the fact that I work remotely full time (it was a novel name before the pandemic 😆).

Blog

Predictions/Thoughts for Artificial Intelligence in April 2026

Before I begin, I will use the term AI below (and above in the title). Technically speaking this is not the best term to use, but in April 2026 AI = LLM’s for most people, so I will stick to this term (at least for this post).

AI assisted Actuarial Modeling, who owns the key ingredient?

The sad news about Montoux

The recent news that Montoux was being liquidated was sad to see. There are not many companies trying to innovate in the Actuarial modeling space and now there is one less. Innovation and disruption almost always lead to good things for customers and so the customers (Actuaries building models) are really one of the biggest losers with this news. Some people are reporting that this was “lawfare”, see here.

Could the Actuarial community benefit from an open Actuarial Intermediate Representation?

Note, when I talk about Actuarial modeling below I’m referring to long term insurance, not P&C.

What is an “Intermediate Representation”?

Programming languages make different trade-offs, some are high level, some are low level. I might consider Python to be high level and Rust to be low level. However, this classification depends on your perspective.

Rust for Domain Experts

Introduction

Over the past few years I have been writing more and more Rust code. I have been using Python for many years, it’s a great language, and I am very productive in it. However, I have come to the conclusion that Rust is a really strong candidate for domain experts to learn. By domain expert I mean someone who does not have a formal computer science background. I’m in this category, my domain being Actuarial Modeling. I will refer to Actuaries below, but you can insert your domain if you are in the same boat as I believe the arguments apply across domains.