Software, math, and everything in between.
Tiny Waffle Coffee I've been working on a side project as a change of pace. I started Tiny Waffle Coffee a few years ago in Philadelphia as a home roastery, selling bags to friends, family, and neighbors. Now that I'm back in San Francisco, I'm getting back into it with the help of a co-roasting facility. I'm taking preorders at tinywaffle.co and the first batch is going out in June. Stripe Agent…
Howdy, hope all is well! Wanted to first note some professional milestones that happened in the past few months and then get into AI current events. Work Wins We did it! After a year and a half of putting our heads down and putting in the work, we launched MN Paid Leave "ahead of schedule and under budget." "...The implementation came in $70 million below its budget, savings that will be…
An analogy I've been thinking about is comparing a software engineering project to how we describe objects in space. Every object has a position, velocity, and acceleration. Measuring these values can describe where it is and where it's going to be. Similarly with software engineering. Is a project new? 0 to 1? Then x = 0.5 while a more established product operating for 5 years can have x = 5. How…
As the year winds down, I thought I'd wrap up with some closing thoughts around AI/ML, engineering, and how it's going professionally. We're still trying to figure out how to responsibly use LLMs / GenAI It's undeniable that LLMs are super useful. But use LLMs for everything and risk becoming a meme . You'll stunt your growth if you make ChatGPT to do your homework. Karpathy highlights "the goal…
I've been running into a lot of great posts on communication and here are some highlights. Wes Kao - Become a better communicator Wes Kao, founder turned communications coach, was on Lenny's Pod . She had a lot of practical advice on communicating with senior leaders and leveraging this skill more broadly in the workplace. I'm keeping two tips in mind. Small, achievable steps. Wes also goes deeper…
Haven't posted in a bit but I'm back! Had a wonderful few weeks. My class on Generative AI wrapped up - very happy with the progress the students made. With the field still in its infancy, I encouraged them to continue to experiment and learn on their own since that's what we're all doing. I also came back from Lisbon and had a great time. It's been a while since I've traveled overseas so it was a…
There are lots of options on how and where to host a personal website. Netlify Vercel GitHub Pages AWS Cloudflare Pages and many more I'm recommending GitHub Pages because it's free, easy to use, and integrates well with GitHub. They have straightforward guide to start here . You can start with raw HTML and CSS. Andrej Karpathy uses this approach. Another option is to use a static site generator.…
"It's versions all the way down" - ChatGPT Much of managing code and dependencies comes down to version management. This post focuses on Python versioning but the concepts can be applied to other languages and tools. Python Versioning Python comes in different versions. 3.13 is in a prerelease state. 3.12 is the latest stable version. You should try to use the latest stable version for your…
LLMs are great at generating text. Trained on the corpus of the internet, fine-tuned to respond in a human-centric manner. LLMs from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and more are battling to convince people to use their models over others. Open source models from Meta and Mistral give an alternative to people that want to host their own models too. The use case for chatbots is compelling. As the Turing…
I love having an idea and being able to bring it to life. One of my side projects after seeing some really cool demos of image recognition was to apply it to my coffee roasting hobby. Could I train a model to recognize the color of coffee beans as they roast? Could I use this to help me roast better coffee? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shMMuNuH3cE The Neuralception blog did the heavy lifting.…