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 there are

I'm working on my master's in computer science [http://www.omscs.gatech.edu/], 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

Scott Young recently profiled Ben Franklin and Van Gogh [https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2017/10/02/how-ben-franklin-learned-to-write/] 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

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 set

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

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