My favorite management failures

2015-02-22

For most people straight out of school, work life is a bit of a culture shock. For me it was an awesome experience, but a lot of the constraints were different and I had to learn to optimize for different things. It wasn’t necessarily the technology that I struggled with. The hardest part was how to manage my own projects and my time, as well as how to grow and make impact as an engineer. I’ve listed some of my biggest mistakes, which are also mistakes I see other (mostly junior) engineers make.

Leaving Spotify

2015-02-11

Febrary 6 was my last day at Spotify. In total I spent more than six years at Spotify and it was an amazing experience.

I joined Spotify in Stockholm in 2008, mainly because a bunch of friends from programming competitions had joined already. Their goal to change music consumption seemed ridiculous at that point, but six years later I think it’s safe to say they actually succeeded.

Scala Data Pipelines for Music Recommendations

2015-01-13

Chris Johnson‘s presentation from Data Day Texas:

Everything I learned about technical debt

2014-12-30

I just made it to Sweden suffering from jet lag induced insomnia, but this blog post will not cover that. Instead, I will talk a little bit about technical debt.

The concept of technical debt always resonated with me, partly because I always like the analogy with “real” debt. If you take the analogy really far, there are some curious implications. I always like to think of the “interest rate” of software development. Debt is really just borrowing from the future, with some interest rate. You are getting a free lunch right now, but you need to pay back 1.2 free lunches in a few months. That’s the interest rate. In a software project the equivalent could be to pick a database that will have scalability issues later, or to make all member variables of some class public. You are doing it because it makes it easier to do things now but you will have to pay the cost of that later.

I already found the best gifs

2014-12-28

Just search for “hackers gif“.

There you go. Fun for your work emails for the next 500 years. From the awesome movie Hackers. That movie together with The Warriors convinced me that I wanted to live in NYC when I was like… 14 years old.

A brief history of Hadoop at Spotify

2014-12-20

I was talking with some data engineers at Spotify and had a moment of nostalgia.

2008

I was writing my master’s thesis at Spotify and had to run a Hadoop job to extract some data from the logs. Every time I started running the job, I kept hearing this subtle noise. I kept noticing the correlation for a few days but I was too intimidated to ask. Finally people starting cursing that their machines had gotten really slow lately and I realized we were running Hadoop on the developer’s desktop machines. No one had told me. I think back then we had only GB’s of log data. I remember running less on the log and I would recognize half the usernames because they were my friends.

Luigi Presentation @ NYC Data Science, Dec 16, 2014

2014-12-17

Luigi talk tomorrow

2014-12-16

At NYC Data Science meetup! Unfortunately the space is full but the talk will be livestreamed – check out the meetup web page for a link tomorrow.

Deep learning for… Go

2014-12-11

This is the last post about deep learning for chess/go/whatever. But this really cool paper by Christopher Clark and Amos Storkey was forwarded to me by Michael Eickenberg. It’s about using convolutional neural networks to play Go. The authors of the paper do a much better job than I would ever have done of modeling move prediction in Go and show that their model beat certain Go engines.