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…
Plotting author statistics for Git repos using Git of Theseus 2018-01-03 I spent a few days during the holidays fixing up a bunch of semi-dormant open source projects and I have a couple of blog posts in the pipeline about various updates. First up, I made a number of fixes to Git of Theseus which is a tool (written in Python) that generates statistics about Git repositories. Read more…
Toxic meeting culture 2017-12-29 I spent six years at a company that went from 50 people to 1500 and one contributing factor leading to my departure was that I went from a “maker” to a person stuck in meetings every day. Read more…
Learning from users faster using machine learning 2017-12-12 I had an interesting idea a few weeks ago, best explained through an example. Let's say you're running an e-commerce site (I kind of do) and you want to optimize the number of purchases. Let's also say we try to learn as much as we can from users, both using A/B tests but also using just basic slicing and dicing of the data. Read more…
Annoy 1.10 released, with Hamming distance and Windows support 2017-11-26 I've been a bit bad at posting things with a regular cadence lately, partly because I'm trying to adjust to having a toddler, partly because the hunt for clicks has caused such a high bar for me that I feel like I have to post something Pulitzer-worthy. Read more…
Why conversion matters: a toy model 2017-10-30 There are often close relationships between top level business metrics. For instance, it's well known that retention has a super strong impact on the valuation of a subscription business. Or that the % of occupied seats is super important for an airline. Read more…
On the Equifax breach and how to really prevent identity theft 2017-09-26 A funny thing about being a foreigner is how you realize people take broken things for granted. I'm going to go out on a limb here claiming that the US has a pretty dumb banking system. Read more…