In 2006, I did my first start-up howcookingworks.com where the idea was a site to learn how to cook. The first part of the site described the techniques of cooking, and the other was where cooks could connect to participants to learn from them. At the time, I went to a lot of start-up
In the early pandemic, I decided to pick up the hobby of reading cookbooks. Fortunately, I had already gone through the phase of baking bread a couple of years earlier, so all of that was out of my system. I was pretty obsessed back then, to the point where the sourdough starter reminded me of
[note – there is some detailed computer science jargon – feel free to skip that if you’d like] Vibe coding is one of these new trends where people who know nothing about computer programming are able to code up websites and applications. It is really quite an impressive thing to do for people who don’t
44 I recently turned 44, and this year resonates more than others for the simple fact that there are two repeating numbers. Other numbers that have come to mind are 22, 44, and 88. At 22, I had just graduated from college with a computer science degree during a mild recession, so none of my
Digital Ghosts My mom recently had a free consultation from her electric company to assess replacing her propane water heater with an electric water pump heater. She forwarded the assessment report to me, and I spent some time reviewing and researching the program. Despite living quite far away, I have been surprised by how much
Data engineering is a field I would categorize as a subspecialty of software engineering. It shares the same concerns as software engineering—scalability, maintainability, and other “-ilities”—but its primary focus is on data. It’s a unique discipline because data is inherently messy, and as a result, no standard enterprise framework has emerged to dominate the space—and
These are a mix of stories from Norway, Croatia, and Slovenia from some past trips. Make Serbia Great Again Our first stop is the city of Dubrovnik in Croatia, which has become well known being the primary filming location for Game of Thrones seasons 2 – 8. I watched the series, and am kind of
AI Updates There is a lot of chatter about 2025 being the year of agentic frameworks. To me, this means a system in which a subset can allow AI models to take independent actions based on their environment, typically interacting with external APIs or interfaces. The terminology around this concept is still evolving, and definitions
Here is this quarter s state of data engineering newsletter. There is only a little chat about AI this time, and a focus on Open Table Formats, the Apache Iceberg Rest Spec, Open Table Format updates, and new updates in the Amazon Data Engineering ecosystem. Prompt Engineering Meta Analysis Whitepaper One of my favorite AI
Growing up I had the same dentist from childhood to adulthood. My dentist’s office was run by Dentist Chung (in Vietnamese I called him Bác Sĩ Chung which means Dr Chung translated directly) and his sister running the office. The office was in Garden Grove, in between the Korean and Vietnamese districts. Walking in