Antipodes 2015-09-08 I was playing around with D3 last night and built a silly visualization of antipodes and how our intuitive understanding of the world sometimes doesn't make sense. Check out the visualization at bl.ocks.org! Basically the idea is if you fly from Beijing to Buenos Aires then you can have a layover at any point of the Earth's surface and it won't make the trip longer. Read more…
Software Engineers and Automation 2015-08-16 Every once in a while when talking to smart people the topic of automation comes up. Technology has made lots of occupations redundant, so what's next? Switchboard operator, a long time ago What about software engineers? Read more…
coin2dice 2015-07-24 Here's a problem that I used to give to candidates. I stopped using it seriously a long time ago since I don't believe in puzzles, but I think it's kind of fun. Let's say you have a function that simulates a random coin flip. Read more…
Benchmark of Approximate Nearest Neighbor libraries 2015-07-04 Annoy is a library written by me that supports fast approximate nearest neighbor queries. Say you have a high (1-1000) dimensional space with points in it, and you want to find the nearest neighbors to some point. Read more…
More Luigi alternatives 2015-07-02 The workflow engine battle has intensified with some more interesting entries lately! Here are a couple I encountered in the last few days. I love that at least two of them are direct references to Luigi! Read more…
3D in D3 2015-06-21 I have spent some time lately with D3. It's a lot of fun to build interactive graphs. See for instance this demo (will provide a longer writeup soon). D3 doesn't have support for 3D but you can do projections into 2D pretty easily. Read more…
The hardest challenge about becoming a manager 2015-06-05 Note: this post is full of pseudo-psychology and highly speculative content. Like most fun stuff! I became a manager back in 2009. Being a developer is fun. You have this very tangible way to measure yourself. Read more…