Missing the point about microservices: it's about testing and deploying independently 2018-06-04 Ok, so I have to first preface this whole blog post by a few things: I really struggle with the term microservices. I can't put my finger on exactly why. Maybe because the term is hopelessly ill-defined, maybe because it's gotten picked up by the hype train. Read more…
Interviewing is a noisy prediction problem 2018-05-02 I have done roughly 2,000 interviews in my life. When I started recruiting, I had so much confidence in my ability to assess people. Let me just throw a couple of algorithm questions at a candidate and then I'll tell you if they are good or not! Read more…
Waiting time, load factor, and queueing theory: why you need to cut your systems a bit of slack 2018-03-27 I've been reading up on operations research lately, including queueing theory. It started out as a way to understand the very complex mortgage process (I work at a mortgage startup) but it's turned into my little hammer and now I see nails everywhere. Read more…
Lessons from content marketing myself (aka blogging) for five years 2018-03-07 I started writing this blog in late 2012, partly because I felt like it would help me improve my English and my writing skills, partly because I kept having a lot of random ideas in my head and I wanted to write them down somewhere. Read more…
New benchmarks for approximate nearest neighbors 2018-02-15 UPDATE(2018-06-17): There are is a later blog post with newer benchmarks! One of my super nerdy interests include approximate algorithms for nearest neighbors in high-dimensional spaces. The problem is simple. You have say 1M points in some high-dimensional space. Read more…
I'm looking for data engineers 2018-01-28 I'm interrupting the regular programming for a quick announcement: we're looking for data engineers at Better. You would be the first one to join and would work a lot directly with me. Some fun things you could work on (these are all projects I'm working on right now): Read more…
Books I consumed in 2017 2018-01-17 Turns out having a toddler isn't super compatible with reading. I used to read ~100 books/year as a teenager, but it has slowly deteriorated to maybe 20-30 books, at most. And I don't even finish all of them because life is too short! Read more…