Ivan Echevarria's blog
A misconception I've seen with some frequency is that the Eames Lounge Chair started out as an affordable piece of furniture that only over time became a luxury good. While Ray and Charles Eames typically designed mass-produced, affordable furniture, the Eames Lounge Chair was explicitly a high-end product from its introduction in 1956. If you actually look at old Herman Miller price lists ,…
It's been another long interval since my last one of these updates. Instead of trying to cover everything between July 2023 and now (June 2025), I'm going to chip away at the backlog. July 2023 My sister stays with my wife and me for a few months starting in July. The three of us go to the SF Art Book Fair . It's a madhouse, lines stretch around the block. Another weekend we watch Barbie (fun but…
In 2017, I made Some Semblance of Clarity , a zine, for a photography class. I made this zine probably around the height of my interest in the intersection of art and technology. I still like each but prefer them mostly separate now. The zine consists of Dag Hammarskjöld 's poem "August 24, 1961" thrown through Google Translate several times as well as 7 photographs with Inception v3 's top 5…
It's early 2022. My close friend has been unemployed and unhappy about it for several months. At some point he moves back in with his parents. We talk while we play video games. Every so often he talks about his situation, how much he wants to have a job again. I'll ask if he's applied to any jobs, and his answer's sometimes yeah one or two, but usually no. As the months go on, he gets more…
This August, I bought a Crust Lightning Bolt frame and had it built up at my local bike shop (thanks Christian!). I have a good number of miles on it across road, trail, and even a bit of chunky singletrack. I'm very happy with the bike. Origins In the summer of 2022, I was riding bikes a lot – mostly my Surly Bridge Club , an all-road touring bike with flat bars. As I rode more and farther, I…
It's been a long time since I did one of these updates. The big changes: got married finished the Bradfield CSI coursework started riding bikes switched teams at work from product to infrastructure March 2022 I start the Bradfield CSI Operating Systems module. I reach 6 months at my job. I remember one of my interviewers saying that the firm will take as much as you give, that exercising…
Caltrain's ridership numbers are a pain to get a hold of, so I made caltrainridership.com . If you go to Caltrain's official ridership page , you get links to three different sources, only one of which, the Caltrain Board of Directors monthly meeting agendas, is up-to-date. Each agenda PDF has at most a year of ridership numbers, but some only have the actual average weekday ridership number for…
Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure is funny, stylish, and imaginative. I think it's close to perfect. It's also, at least in part, an ironic reflection on how ineffective art is as a tool for social change. The film ends with a character explaining how Bill and Ted's band shapes the course of history: "Wyld Stallyns' music has become the foundation of our whole society... eventually your music…
I spent many of my weekends and evenings working on the Data Structures for Storage and Retrieval module of the Bradfield CSI . I think this may have been my favorite yet. Unlike your typical data structures class, the Bradfield one focused on practical applications of data structures and is centered around implementing a key-value database from scratch. In the process, I learned about skip lists,…
Nobody asked me to write this, and I don't benefit materially from you joining. Choosing to take courses at Bradfield School of Computer Science is probably the best decision I've made for my career and my craft. If you're a software engineer, you should consider applying. This is a loose collection of thoughts about my time in the Computer Science Intensive (CSI) and at Bradfield generally. I…