Posts

  • False Status

    Ideas about work and life in large-scale systems.

  • Remarkable

    What I'm learning about remarkable things

  • Meaningful Work

    Or why I'm becoming ornery and what I'm doing about it.

  • Confident Work

    Thoughts about building products

  • Repeat

    Something about life and thinking

  • Ideas

    A few ideas about thinking that are interesting.

  • Trifecta

    My bet on the top-three sense mechanisms that make intelligent systems tractable

  • Shower Thoughts

    Two thoughts I've had lately that seem important days later.

  • Logics

    Some notes on different logics, refreshing what might be useful for knowledge base work.

  • Daily Review

    Every day I learn something. Writing it down is important.

  • Blackbox Combinatorial Solvers

    There are opportunities afoot

  • Embedding Architecture

    Thinking about data architecture

  • Data Work

    Comparing my views with the Data Project Checklist.

  • Proper Work of the Mind

    Thinking on Epictetus.

  • Data Audit

    About a top-down view on an organization's data practices.

  • Experiment Early

    Lessons learned from using nbdev.

  • The Data Lab

    The kind of data lab I want.

  • Enrollment

    Thinking about starts.

  • Few Hop Learning and Modality

    Some Deep Learning notes.

  • D3

    D3 is great, but not as a data visualization library.

  • Qlik

    I'm impressed with Qlik. It feels consistent with the tools we're building at Branch. There are fundamental differences between our approaches that I outline here.

  • Pipeline Patterns

    Things that will work in ten years are worth learning well today.

  • Finish

    This is getting serious. Finish things.

  • Grease Fires

    Rather than starting grease fires, build furnaces.

  • NLP Tasks

    Some focus on the tasks I'm interested in, and what I think they do for me.

  • Gold Standard Topic Modeling

    Some ideas for a full topic modeling solution, without deep learning

  • Pace and Pipeline

    Notes on the pace of work and an NLP preprocessing pipeline.

  • NLP

    Named Entity Recognition, CorEx, Topic Modeling, Event Extraction

  • Strategy

    A Spy's Guide to Strategy and how that may apply to today's political situation.

  • Technology

    Ideas on our relationship to our work.

  • Power

    Power in a noisy world.

  • Product Gaps and Matching Qustions

    A really good talk about how to deal with user experience gaps and a really good write up on an NLP problem finding duplicates in questions from Quora data.

  • Spell Checking Algorithms

    Choosing a spell checking algorithm means learning about how the algorithms work.

  • Model Development

    General process for developing a machine learning model.

  • SARIMA

    Baseline time series models

  • Managing the Mind, LDA Models, Passive Income

    Some work from Zat Rana, a passive income entrepreneur, and a data scientist.

  • Creative Writing

    Some short narrative insights from Joyce Carol Oates and some action advice from Chuck Palahnuk.

  • Research Plan

    I'm finally ready to organize and disclose my research plan. Over the next 90 days, I am focusing on deploying natural language processing models to support general workflow enhancement tools.

  • Language

    Some notes on human language from CS 224 NLP at Stanford.

  • Current Context

    From whistleblowers to social media, how are we doing? I've collected disagreeing perspectives on our collective progress.

  • Founder-Driven VC, Feature Engineering

    Notes from an interview with Keith Rabois and a micro course on Kaggle.

  • Poetry Workshop and a Deer Walks into a Bar

    Some notes from Billy Collins' Masterclass, playing around with a poem from a video I saw today, and something from Jim Harrison..

  • Why I May Be Delusional

    Big picture, technology is moving fast, and a concientious person know whether they are making a difference or making an excuse.

  • Dataset Shift and Neural Processes

    Some notes on how to maintain models in production, plus implementing gaussian processes in a neural network.

  • NLP Review for Spam Detection

    A review of NLP tasks useful for review spam detection.

  • Actor Model

    A few notes on the main advantages of the actor model for distributed computing.

  • Creators

    Refections on a life's work.

  • Organize Data Work

    Some notes on making data work reproducible.

  • Reading, Deploying Machine Learning, and Actualization

    Learning to appreciate what we're working with, from reading to data work to ourselves--all of today's reading focus my attention on appreciating what I have and handlig it well.

  • Drive Details Down

    Good software manages the details well. Drive them down deeper into modules to make the software more valuable.

  • Mentoring

    Some notes about mentoring interns and new hires.

  • Note Curation

    Permanent notes is a misnomer, they're permanently available, but can teach me things and I can curate them.

  • Crafting the Personal Essay

    Write with structure and professionalism. Roxane Gay can show us how. These are my notes from a Skillshare course, with a lot of valuable information and material not included here.

  • GraphQL and Memory

    Some notes on GraphQL clients and odd-ball notes from a poorly cited documentary on Netflix.

  • Distlillation Models

    Focusing NLP models with model distillation, a case outline.

  • Big Goals and Skill Learning

    Having the courage to make big goals and learning a deliberate practice to learn new skills.

  • Poetry, Story, Caffeine, and Engineering Managment

    Some thoughts on modern poetry, the storyform approach to plot structure, medical effects from caffeine, and managing engineers.

  • Politics, CAPTCHAs, Distortions, and Meetings

    Some notes on Nate Silver's predictions on the Democratic field for US President, a quick overview about CAPTCHAs and web scraping, an outline of intellectual distortions, and some really good notes about how to conduct more effective meetings.

  • Distributed Systems, Uber, and Cognitive Distortion

    A summary of designing distributed data systems, notes on where Uber messed up, and identifying cognitive distortion.

  • Seeking Awe

    Currating some older slips that include a poem I wrote after reading a book of Haiku and some research on how awe affects our lives.

  • Poetry, scikit-learn Interface, Machine Learning, and Craft Annotation

    Conversations around poetry, the scikit-learn interface, machine learning, and craft annotation.

  • Daily Post for September 5, 2019

    Rough draft ideas from things researched around September 5, 2019

  • Daily Post for September 4, 2019

    Rough draft ideas from things researched around September 4, 2019

  • Competency

    Learning to be a contributor on projects takes a leap. Reflecting with a buddy, here's what I've learned.

  • Note to Self

    Career advice I'd give my 20-year-old self.

  • Ecto.Multi and Sane Code

    Keeping code sane and reasonable for non-trivial business logic using Elixir and Phoenix.

  • Getting Answers while Data is Sparse Act 1: Promises and Baseball

    Wherein we set the stage for thinking about mixing subjective data with empirical data in graphical models.

  • Intuitive Boosting

    Take a minute to understand how boosting algorithms work and things to keep in mind when building models with them.

  • Github Pages Tutorial

  • The Paradox of Big Data

    Curious people find more questions to ask when the data is bigger. This is a review of pragmatic principles for data analysis.

  • But You Gotta Know It

    Career advice I gave to my son that I think also applies to junior developers as well as boot camp graduates.

  • If I Had to Bet...

    Thinking about the qualities I find the most and least effective in software development.

  • Where Are We Going?

    An effective leader gets their people to ask "Where are we going and how can I help?" These are lessons learned from effective and frustrating experiences delivering software systems for over 20 years in the business.

  • Quantified Baseline

    Some more thoughts on my progress increasing my intellectual abilities.

  • Quantified Self

    An approach to measuring my throughput as a software developer

  • Test Power to the People

    Getting comfortable with testing our code shouldn't be as hard as it is.

  • How Not to Be a Junior Developer

    I keep having this conversation about how to break into the development world. Some of these people have gone to developer boot camps or spent years learning new skills. A lot of the advice seems to be the same, stop being a junior developer and learn how to contribute to a team.

  • Gaussian IQ

    Instead of raging online, I thought I'd do a practical refresher on the normal distribution instead.

  • Random Walk

    MWRC, Mazes and Me, Oh My!

  • Saving Puppies

    Learning what makes software development important from the eyes of an 11-year-old girl.

  • Pairing Makes Progress

    So far, my pairing invitation has turned into some great learning opportunities. Here's some of what I've learned lately.

  • Pairing

    Pairing isn't extreme unless you make it extreme. Here's a detailed look at what I've learned from it. It's also an invitation if you want to reach out and build something together.

  • Six Months

    We can learn most technologies in six months. This is a guide for anyone learning a new technology.

  • Human Capacity

    Realizing how much capacity I have as a human being, I re-commit to learning and contributing. Where I focus I improve.

  • Getting Better

    A quick reminder to myself to keep working on things that are important and that I've been avoiding.

  • Plants vs Zombies

    Everything important I know about software can be expressed in Plants vs Zombies.

  • A Gaggle of React Components

    Spurred by student questions, I realize I should share how I progress through a problem. I take a concept from React.js and walk carefully from step to step.

  • Getting Out of the Mud

    New learners sometimes feel stupid when learning something new. It's not easy, but the problem isn't intelligence. It's often practice and familiarity. One way to get that quickly is SQ3R. Here's an introduction to the idea and how I applied it to my work.

  • Agile and Agility

    Striving to learn lessons from my experience at a large corporation, this article combines Dave Thomas' ideas on agility with my desire to do something worthwhile with my career.

  • Problem Solving

    Taking the advice of the JavaScript community, I'm blogging whenever I solve a problem. This helps me remember the lessons I've learned. It also helps me clarify my thoughts.

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