After four years living in Evanston, and a year away, returning to Chicago was strange. Very strange. I am sad that I didn’t take more photos of the city, with its architecture and its urban landscapes, but I am glad that the reason why I did not do it was that I had too many people to see. More...
Hi there. It had been a while! I have read a lot less than usual lately, but here are a few things I’ve recently enjoyed.
Through an analogy between learning CS, and how to play musical instruments, the author explains the value of reinventing the wheel: cloning other people’s projects allows you to learn useful patterns as you go. Start by mimicking, and continue adding your own features. The important part is putting your fingers to work. For example, I got my start with Michael Hartl’s Rails Tutorial, and modified it bit by bit to fit my needs. One of the best pieces I have read on how to “level up” as a software engineer.
“White people studies.”
I learned this exists from my manager, who used to work at Netflix. Mind blown.
TLDR, no one noticed until the guy revealed it.
The “best” is not always enough.
Culture is fascinating, but also really subjective, making it hard to quantify, or analyze. To make it worse, it is turtles all the way down: culture matters at the company, division, group, team and individual basis, and the larger the company the more culture solidifies as a “thing” that makes that company what it is.
Speed is rarely the reason to pick a programming language these days. See below.
Mostly, its a matter of taste. See above.
It takes guts to describe your company as the “…most popular way to buy, sell, and use bitcoin” or, more humbly, a “bitcoin wallet and platform” and then come out and say that something else is better, and possibly more sustainable, than BTC. Smells like a soft pivot to cryptocurrencies in general could be coming.
Never thought steel could be this fascinating.
If I am sharing an article by this guy, it must be good. Never thought I’d do that, but he does bring up good points.
An epic article about Antarctica, family ties, global warming, and the future.
A very cool project. Can’t go wrong with mapping + Python + 3D Printing.
The machine learning inspired cousin to Fizz Buzz in Too Much Detail. You shouldn’t miss this one, even if your knowledge of ML is minimal.
The legal field is not very technologically enabled. As Casetext’s Jake Heller points out, “We’ve all seen this story. Whether it’s restaurants or encyclopedias, this is going to be replaced by an open knowledge solution.” The question is, which of all these services will win the market (full disclosure, my girlfriend works at Casetext, and I think they are doing great work at making legal data easily available).
While I enjoy reading about the breakthrough techniques in deep learning, applied machine learning, with weird and fun objectives and non-standard datasets is much more exciting.
The article talks about topics beyond management, but spends a good chunk of time discussing why projects with many moving pieces, many stakeholders, and many contributors are hard to do right. Mostly, because people are hard to understand. If you understand people, you’ll be a better engineer, better designer, and better manager.
As Marco says, “…the last thing we all need is for the ‘data’ economy to destroy another medium.” Implied, but not mentioned in the article, is the discoverability problem of podcasts. Finding 10 shows that you generally like is easy. Finding the best episode of those 10 shows is impossible.
Incentives…
Life is strange. One letter (email?) could really change yours. Send it today.
It is weird when you can’t credit an author because their work doesn’t list their name. </br> As a side note, tweeting this got me into a strange twitter fight.
Good analysis of why the US can’t play the isolation game going forward. Even if you don’t care about politics, and you should, it is worth your time just for the amazing list of books that Suster recommends.
While I understand the point of regulation, Opternative delivers exactly what it advertises: refractive eye exams. The incumbents are just using regulation to push their interests and avoid getting pushed out of the market. But, obviously, I am biased. I used to work there.
Possibly my favorite opening paragraph in a TechCrunch article, ever.
Economic models can be bent to lie. Usually, not this blatantly, though.
This article is just a curiosity. The fact that Quartz opens with “Leer en español” was very unexpected.
Extreme clarity on the future of journalism, media, and strategies for companies in the space to respond to change. TL;DR: create better content or disappear. The arguments fit perfectly with Aggregation Theory, and while the article is a bit too focused on politics, the analysis could apply to any other news covered by the media, from the Tech Bubble, to ISIS, or Millenials. Long, but worthwhile.</br>I have been reading Baekdal for years. I can’t even remember how I ran into his blog, but it must have been 7 or 8 years ago, and I am glad I did.
While I have read (…skimmed 🙄) Mary Meeker’s report several years in a row by now, I had never consciously noticed the acceleration of adoption rates of new technologies.
Possibly more interesting than the opt-in model championed by Blendle.
Evans has a knack for finding great analogies from history. In most cases, path dependence, network effects, consumer lock in, and feedback loops matter more than any one decision. I wonder if we can systematically figure out the decisions that matter more…
Somehow, the dots connect in the future.
Was not expecting Uncle Bob to finish on that note. The history of programming languages is a big question mark for me. If you have a good book/blog post to recommend on it, please send it my way.
Ben sounds more bullish in this article than in the past few, especially Exponent.
Yet another bear case for Apple pinned on the cult of personality for Steve Jobs. While I disagree with the overall message, the writing is really good, and Lefsetz does have a point on the strategy of innovation, viz. Christensen’s disruptive innovation.
The title says it all.