Latest Posts

• Book of the Week: The Happiness Hypothesis

  This week I read The Happiness Hypothesis, which was mentioned in another book I read. I didn’t like the book. Most of the happiness books I read tell things up front and go over different research studies. This book does have some research studies, but I’ve read about those studies in other books. What’s different about this book is that it approaches happiness from historical philosophical and religious perspectives. Ancient wisdom isn’t as compelling to me as peer reviewed research that provides concrete information about happiness. It is good to read books that approach happiness from a different angle even though you may not like it. Divided Self

• Book of the Week: High Output Management

  High Output Management is one of the books that is on the reading list for business people. The book was written by Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel (INTC). At first I was turned off by the book since it was directed at middle managers. I have a disdain for middle managers, because they don’t really do anything and add to organizational complexity. They aren’t the ones in the trenches doing things. Then Andy mentioned “know-how managers”, who use their specialized knowledge to influence organizations. A manager’s output is the output of their organization and output of other organizations influenced by the manager. Damn it, I’m a middle manager since my output is not solely dependent on myself. Once I got over that, the book was pretty good and I could see why it is on those reading list. There are three ideas in the book.

• Book of the Week: Liar's Poker

  Before Michael Lewis wrote Flash Boys, he was a bond salesman for Salomon Brothers in London. Salomon Brothers was described in When Genuis Failed, but Liar’s Poker goes into more depth inside the company. Fools

• Book of the Week: Getting Real

  Scott Cook, one of the cofounders of Intuit, recommended Getting Real: The Smarter, Faster, Easier Way to Build a Successful Web Application by Jason Fried, during his talk at Stanford. I previously read Rework by Jason Fried. If you wanted a different way of building a web application instead of raising tons of VC money and burning it in Silicon Valley, read this. The book was a quick read, because it condensed all the relevant points. Here are a few sections from the book. Start With No It is important to do one thing well than trying to everything poorly. A fork and a spoon is much better than a spork. How often to see sporks in places other than school cafeteria? In order to do the core things well, you need to say no to feature requests. Hidden Costs If a request makes it past you saying no, you need identify all the hidden costs associated with said request. Then you can say no again. Forget Feature Requests If something is important enough, your customers will bring it up again. No need to track and remember stuff. This is why it is important to get users early on. It is impossible to respond to every feature request. From Idea to Implementation

• Book of the Week: Honeybee Democracy

  This week I read Honeybee Democracy by Thomas D. Seeley after it was mentioned in Simple Rules. This book is about how honeybees make decisions when they swarm.

• Book of the Week: When Genius Failed

  When I read the title, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management, I thought long-term capital management was a concept and not a company. How little I know. They named the company that way for a reason. This book reminds of this XKCD comic: Engineer Syllogism. Long-Term Capital Management Cast

• Book of the Week: The Alchemist

  I never heard of The Alchemist, but my coworker was reading it, so I thought I’d also give it a read. The Alchemist was originally published in Brazil and subsequently translated from Portuguese into English. It is hard to write about this book without revealing spoilers. It is short enough that you can read it in a sitting or two. Personal Legend The book is about pursuing your Personal Legend, what you have always wanted to accomplish.

• Book of the Week: Modern Romance

  This week I read Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari, the comedian, with Eric Klinenberg, the sociologist. In the past people married people who were local to them through arranged marriages. Times have changed with the smartphone age, which leaves current singles puzzled trying to figure out what the heck is going on. People are left to navigate two worlds: the real world and the phone world.

• Book of the Week: How to Make Mistakes in Python

  After you’ve learned a new programming language, it is important that you get caught up with best practices. This week, I read How to Make Mistakes in Python, because it was free. Most of the content you can read online, but it is nice to have a starting point in once place. The book is written from the point of view of a python web developer. Quick read and good reminder. Environment I can sometimes be difficult to know where each package is installed and the environment matching between your development environment and production environment. You can use virtualenv to setup a self-contained environment to install your python packages. As you development, you tend to collect packages. Jupyter and ipython provide a better REPL than the standard python REPL. You should use them to be more productive. Tab completing is very nice. Best Practices Optimize and check for errors with pylint. Follow a style guide such as pep8 or Google’s python style guide. Add logging. Use nose to run unittest. I also like doctest. Tips Try using strategy pattern instead of if else blocks. Don’t put list as default argument unless you know what you’re doing, because that list will be persistent through all the function calls. You’re not going to get an empty list every time you call the function. [sourcecode language=”python” wraplines=”false” collapse=”false”] def bad(arg=[]): pass def good(arg=None): if not arg: arg = [] [/sourcecode]

• Book of the Week: Simple Rules

  I didn’t really like Simple Rules. One thing that bugged me was when the authors said simple rules outperform complex models, because of overfitting problems. Anybody who builds complex models for a living, should know how to handle overfitting. That’s a bad argument to make. Machine learning algorithms outperform most heuristics now. The book is fairly recent, so some of the things it references feels like it happened yesterday. I tend to think of simple rules are for people who don’t understand what’s happening. In chemistry they teach you rules about how bonds work, but you always encounter exceptions that run contrary to your rules. If you knew quantum physics, you would know why certain things happen contrary to the rules. It’s probably not worth the time to teach all chemistry students quantum mechanics, so you give them a simple rule to follow, which is good enough to get them through med school. Complex Problems Warren Weaver, a director at the Rockefeller Foundation described science progressing through three types of problems: simple, uncertain and complex. For those familiar with material science, you can think of it as the microscopic (simple), macroscopic (uncertain) and mesoscopic (complex). The microscope deals with understanding individual particles. The macroscopic deals with distributions and collective probabilistic behavior. The mesoscopic deals with the middle ground, where theories from the other two don’t work well. Most of my academic research is in the complex region, because the other two are solved problems. Physics can describe a single hydrogen atom well. We can also calculate the properties of a periodic material. What we can’t do well is describe what happens when you have an atom next to an infinite structure. This taxes the limits of current computers. Simple rules are designed to handle the complex problems. Simple Rules Simple rules do 3 things well.

• The 4 Types of Software Developers

  A machine learning expert remarked that they are 4 types of software developers and proceeded to describe them all. Here is my fuzzy recollection of the conversation.

• Book of the Week: An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth

  This week, I read retired Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield’s An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth: What Going to Space Taught Me About Ingenuity, Determination and Being Prepared for Anything. You may recognize Chris from his public outreach efforts when he was on the International Space Station (ISS). If you ever wanted to know how it feels like to be an astronaut (enemas before launch), this book is for you. I’ve read plenty of books about success and happiness, but Chris Hadfield is a person who has lived it. He speaks from personal experience instead of scientific studies. Somehow it seems more real coming from him. Space Oddity Music Video [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaOC9danxNo&w;=560&h;=315] Space Burrito with Chef Traci Des Jardins w/ The MythBusters [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8-UKqGZ_hs&w;=560&h;=315] Astronaut