Some more font links

2016-01-25

My blog post about fonts generated lots of traffic – it landed on Hacker News, took down my site while I was sleeping, and then obviously vanished from HN before I woke up. But it also got retweeted by a ton of people.

Analyzing 50k fonts using deep neural networks

2016-01-21

For some reason I decided one night I wanted to get a bunch of fonts. A lot of them. An hour later I had a bunch of scrapy scripts pulling down fonts and a few days later I had more than 50k fonts on my computer.

I believe in the 10x engineer, but...

2016-01-08

The easiest way to be a 10x engineer is to make 10 other engineers 2x more efficient. Someone can be a 10x engineer if they do nothing for 364 days then convinces the team to change programming language to a 2x more productive language.

A motivated 10x engineer in one team could be a demotivated 0.5x engineer in another team (and vice versa).

A average 1x engineer could easily become a 5x engineer if surrounded by 10x engineers. Engagement and work ethics is contagious.

The cynical reason why 10x engineers aren’t paid 10x more salary is that there is no way for the new employer to know. There is no “10x badge”.

…but also, a 10x engineer can go to a new company and become an 1x engineer because of bad focus / bad engagement / tech stack mismatch.

So unfortunately there’s less economic rationality for companies to pay 10x salaries to 10x engineers (contrary to what Google or Netflix says)
There’s no such thing as a 10x engineer spending time on something that never ends up delivering business value. If something doesn’t deliver business value, it’s 0x.
If you build something that the average engineer would not have been able to build, no matter how much time, that can make you 100x or 1000x, or ∞x. Quoting Alexander Scott: There is no number of ordinary eight-year-olds who, when organized into a team, will become smart enough to beat a grandmaster in chess.
Most of the 10x factor is most likely explained by team and company factors (process, tech stack, etc) and applies to everyone in the team/company. Intra-team variation is thus much smaller than 10x (even controlling for the fact that companies tend to attract people of equal caliber). Nature vs nurture…
I’ve never met the legendary “10x jerk”. Anecdotally the outperforming engineers are generally nice and humble.
Don’t get hung up on the exact numbers here, it’s just for illustration purposes. I.e. someone introduced a bug in the trading system of Knight Capital that made them lose $465M in 30 minutes. Did that make it a -1,000,000x engineer? (and btw it had more to do with company culture). The numbers aren’t meant to be taken literally.

Books I read in 2015

2016-01-01

Early last year when I left Spotify I decided to do more reading. I was planning to read at least one book per week and in particular I wanted to brush up on management, economics, and technology. 2015 was also a year of exclusively non-fiction, which is a pretty drastic shift, since I grew up reading fiction compulsively for 20 years.

More MCMC – Analyzing a small dataset with 1-5 ratings

2015-12-05

I’ve been obsessed with how to iterate quickly based on small scale feedback lately. One awesome website I encountered is Usability Hub which lets you run 5 second tests. Users see your site for 5 seconds and you can ask them free-form questions afterwards. The nice thing is you don’t even have to build the site – just upload a static png/jpg and collect data.

There is no magic trick

2015-11-28

(Warning: super speculative, feel free to ignore)

As Yogi Berra said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future”. Unfortunately predicting is hard, and unsurprisingly people look for the Magic Trick™ that can resolve all the uncertainty. Whether it’s recruiting, investing, system design, finding your soulmate, or anything else, there’s always an alleged shortcut.

Installing TensorFlow on AWS

2015-11-12

Curious about Google’s newly released TensorFlow? I don’t have a beefy GPU machine, so I spent some time getting it to run on EC2. The steps on how to reproduce it are pretty brutal and I wouldn’t recommend going through it unless you want to waste five hours of your live.

Looking for smart people

2015-11-04

I haven’t mentioned what I’m currently up to. Earlier this year I left Spotify to join a small startup called Better. We’re going after one of the biggest industries in the world that also turns out to be completely broken. The mortgage industry might not be the #1 industry you pictured yourself in, but it’s an enormous opportunity to fix a series of real consumer problems and join a company that I predict will be huge.

MCMC for marketing data

2015-10-31

The other day I was looking at marketing spend broken down by channel and wanted to compute some simple uncertainty estimates. I have data like this:

<th>
  Total spend
</th>

<th>
  Transactions
</th>

<td>
  2292.04
</td>

<td>
  9
</td>

<td>
  1276.85
</td>

<td>
  2
</td>

<td>
  139.59
</td>

<td>
  3
</td>

<td>
  954.98
</td>

<td>
  5
</td>


Channel A
Channel B
Channel C
Channel D

Of course, it’s easy to compute the cost per transaction, but how do you produce uncertainty estimates? Turns out to be somewhat nontrivial. I don’t even think it’s possible to do a t-test, which is kind of interesting in itself.

Interview with a Data Scientist: Erik Bernhardsson

2015-10-28

I was featured in Peadar Coyle’s interview series interviewing various “data scientists” – which is kind of arguable since (a) all the other ppl in that series are much cooler than me (b) I’m not really a data scientist. Anyway, reposting the full interview:

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Erik Bernhardsson