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…
The mathematical principles of management 2017-04-09 I've read about 100 management books by now but if there's something that always bothered me it's the lack of first principles thinking. Basically it's a ton of heuristics. And heuristics are great, but when you present heuristics as true objectives, it kind of clouds the underlying objectives (and you end up with weird proxy cults like the Agile movement 👹 – not that I disagree with it, I just wish they could derive it from a more systematic understanding of project management). Read more…
The eigenvector of "Why we moved from language X to language Y" 2017-03-15 I was reading yet another blog post titled “Why our team moved from <language X> to <language Y>” (I forgot which one) and I started wondering if you can generalize it a bit. Is it possible to generate a N * N contingency table of moving from language X to language Y? Read more…
Why I went into the mortgage industry 2017-02-17 I just realized last Thursday that I have spent two full years at Better, incidentally on the same day as we announced a $15M round led by Kleiner Perkins. So it was a good point to reflect a bit and think back – what the F led me to abandon my role managing the machine learning team at Spotify? Read more…
Language pitch 2017-02-01 Here's a fun analysis that I did of the pitch (aka. frequency) of various languages. Certain languages are simply pronounced with lower or higher pitch. Whether this is a feature of the language or more a cultural thing is a good question, but there are some substantial differences between languages. Read more…
Functional programming is the libertarianism of software engineering 2017-01-10 This is a pretty dumb post, in which I argue that functional programming has a lot of the bad parts of libertarianism and a lot of the good parts: Both ideologies strive to eliminate [the] state. Read more…
The half-life of code & the ship of Theseus 2016-12-05 As a project evolves, does the new code just add on top of the old code? Or does it replace the old code slowly over time? In order to understand this, I built a little thing to analyze Git projects, with help from the formidable GitPython project. Read more…