Sasha

I just finished Show Your Work. It's such a good little primer on how much you can gain from sharing your in-progress work as you go, as well as really specific tactical pointers on what and how to share. It was a real shot in the arm that I needed—

And Writing Club was born! It was an idea I'd been mulling over for a while. I'd really love to say that I have the discipline to do any hard thing I want to do, but the older I get, the more I accept that accountability is really, really effective.

In school I was thorough and a hard worker. I liked to do everything, and do it in order. When I first worked at early-stage startups it quickly became obvious that my to-do list was longer than my available time. The only way to be successful there was to prioritize

In a few hours I'm heading to Pycon North America, the biggest Python conference in the world. I'm looking forward to seeing friends and colleagues from college and previous jobs and work. I generally spend most of my time at conferences in the "hallway track" meeting people, but

I'm working on my master's in computer science, and this fall I took my first course: Machine Learning for Trading. I picked it partially out of interest and partially out of pragmatics: since I haven't been in school for many years and I've never worked full time while in school,

Scott Young recently profiled Ben Franklin and Van Gogh as people who used copying to learn writing and painting, respectively. He points out that by devaluing copying in creative achievement, we also throw out its value in learning fundamental techniques. I've seen this in action watching so many people improve

Context Today I ran an informal Lunch & Learn for my coworkers on the basics of getting a password manager set up. I intended for the session to be ten minutes of light lecture and the rest of the time to get set up—many people have always meant to

I grabbed this book from the library because it's been so highly recommended, and because I've been enjoying the backlash to Busy Culture the last couple of years. I've been finding that my life feels much better when it's not packed to the gills and I can focus on only

WAIT! Come back! Hear me out. I found this great app that solves many of my money-managing problems like a DREAM, and I'm even finding that it's changing the way I think about how I spend my time. Check it out. Money is hard I'm pretty OK with money. I've

We're writing lots of tests for a current client project that's going to be open sourced. I understand the mechanics of writing unit tests but always wondered if my tests could be simpler and more thorough, and worried about missing things. I was curious to learn if I could write

Coming from the startup world, I used to think this advice was unambiguously Good Advice not just for hiring, but for How to Be Good. "I don't care how smart someone is—if they are unable to work hard and crank out a large amount of high quality work,

In a conversation on Twitter, someone posed the question: what do you wish you'd known about bias when you started working in tech? One of my replies was "that assigning work by asking for volunteers is unfair." Another person was curious about my response and asked if there

Wait, what? Flash cards can make you a better programmer? Programming is a complex, sophisticated skill. And flash cards are about drilling very low-level, atomic information! Yes, that's true! Flash cards alone will never make you a good programmer. But programming is also made up of low-level skills, like remembering

I never blog. I have a list of more than two hundred blog post ideas. About half of them are worth exploring, and maybe a tenth are actually any good. So why don't I actually publish blog posts? I tried increasing my motivation by joining up with various friends for