The software engineering rule of 3 2017-08-29 Here's a dumb extremely accurate rule I'm postulating* for software engineering projects: *you need at least 3 examples before you solve the right problem*. This is what I've noticed: Don't factor out shared code between two classes. Read more…
Machine, Platform, Crowd 2017-08-19 I just bought Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future and discovered that it mentions my blog – in particular the post When machine learning matters. Ok, I lied a little bit. I didn't discover it serendipitously. Read more…
Google diversity memo, global warming, Pascal's wager, and other stuff 2017-08-14 There's about 765 million blog posts about the diversity “memo” that leaked out of Google a couple of weeks ago. I think the case for any biological difference is pretty weak, and it bothers me when people refer to an “interest gap” as anything else than caused by the environment. Read more…
Fun with trigonometry: the world's most twisted coastline 2017-07-12 I just spent a few days in Italy, on the Ligurian coast. Even though we were on the west side of Italy, the Mediterranean sea was to the east, because the house was situated on a long bay. Read more…
Optimizing for iteration speed 2017-07-06 I've written before about the importance of iterating quickly but I didn't necessarily talk about some concrete things you can do. When I've built up the tech team at Better, I've intentionally optimized for fast iteration speed above almost everything else. Read more…
Blogroll 2017-06-09 Remember when everyone had a really ugly blog with a blogroll? Anyway, just think the word is funny. I follow a few hundred blogs using Feedly and Reeder and have been reading a few hundred thousand blog posts over the last 10 years. Read more…
Conversion rates – you are (most likely) computing them wrong 2017-05-23 How hard can it be to compute conversion rate? Take the total number of users that converted and divide them with the total number of users. Done. Except… it's a lot more complicated when you have any sort of significant time lag. Read more…