Quick thoughts from reading The Infinite Hows If you are trying to establish a healthy postmortem culture at your company, then you should lean on an established framework. The Five Whys, despite the attempted take down from the Infinite Hows, holds up with healthy doses of blameless culture and openness to real-world complexity. A coworker [ ]
I recently started a new job that communicates on Slack instead of email. This may seem like a small difference, but in fact it is a paradigm shift. Put simply: email encourages private conversations, and Slack encourages public ones. Most Slack conversations happen in public channels, while most emails happen in limited groups. Even when [ ]
As an engineering manager of a small team, I sometimes find myself trying to articulate why a solution is too hacky . Hackiness is a nebulous concept in software engineering, but it presents itself with some tell-tale signs: Hacky solutions often have a much smaller time estimate than the original gut estimate from leadership Hacky solutions [ ]
TLDR: To track my Coinbase portfolio for free, I Dockerized an existing script that generates portfolio metrics and ran it continuously on AWS. Read on to learn about my motivations and the process. Code is located on Github. Thanks to Matias B for providing the original tool. I generally have a good experience using Coinbase [ ]
Lately I ve been trying to learn more about Amazon Web Services (AWS) and some other popular technologies. Since I work at a large tech company, I spend a lot of my professional time using proprietary software that is analogous to but very different from what most folks would use for the same task. In this [ ]
TL;DR In this post I describe fine-tuning GPT-2, a powerful natural language model, for the task of generating fake rock climbing route descriptions. A climbing route description uses technical climbing jargon to describe a specific pathway up a rock face, and each one is unique. As seems to be common with GPT-2, I found that [ ]
In part 1 of this series, I described my goal of understanding the rock climbing community with data. I also summarized my process of collecting and cleaning about 4 million climbing records (ticks). After cleaning my tick dataset and converting it into a table of climbers, I attempted clustering on the climbers, only to find [ ]
By now, being a software engineer and a rock climber is somewhat cliché. This archetype is usually explained by the cerebral similarities between tricky climbing sequences and programming problems. My more cynical theory is that many software engineers avoided traditional sports in their youth, and climbing offers a friendly path to adult fitness. Whatever the [ ]
Whether on plastic or granite, I am a stickler about sending. If you hang around the gym, you’ll hear a lot of talk about sending this or that route. At first glance, some of these tales will surprise you. (ex: Johnny only started climbing a few months ago, and he just sent his first 5.12!) [ ]
If you climb, especially at The Gunks, you may have heard Rule #1 tossed around the crag. If you climb often, you may have even heard Rule #2. Combined, this counsel is meant to guide your choices on the rock: Rule #1: Don’t fuck up and die — the rest are details.Rule #2: If you do violate Rule [ ]