What I Read in 2025
This year I read 30 books (just 2 in Spanish).
pragmatist
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The Time We Ran a Super Bowl Ad
I’ve got a story to tell. It’s been 14 years, so I think we’re past the statute of limitations on this one. I’m also pretty sure nothing here qualifies as proprietary anymore. One disclaimer: I’m working from 14-year-old memories, so I might get some of the details wrong, but I’m pretty sure I’ve got most of the story right.
Playing With LLMs As A Binary Classifier
A friend of mine leads an internal data team for hospital group. They recently received the updated 2025 ICD-10 codes which is a coding system of ~74,000 codes that are used by healthcare providers and insurance companies for billing, tracking public health trends, and medical recordkeeping. Basically, they got handed a plain text file with 74,260 lines and were asked to annotate the data with…
What I Read in 2024
Looking back, I noticed a couple of themes in my reading this year. One was biographies of people who had achieved success and then figured out how to change so that the drive that propelled their success didn’t eat them from the inside (Becoming Steve Jobs, Pep Guardiola) Another theme was books that prompted some reflection that I would read (or listen to) in the morning as I got the kids ready…
What I Read in 2023
I read 18 books in 2023. Including 5 in Spanish. Here they are.
Monitor For The Absence Of Success, Not Just the Presence of Failures
Let’s start with a brief story: last year one of my teams built a new system that was in a limited beta. The system was dependent on receiving messages from an upstream system owned by a different team in an entirely different part of the company. It processed those messages, using them to display something to customers that had a meaningful positive impact on purchase conversion for the small…
What I Read in 2022
I read 18 books in 2022. Including 4 in Spanish. Here they are.
A Brief Morality Play About A Cool, User Friendly Feature
I saw a feature request from my friend and former colleague Ellen Beldner last night on Twitter: i simply want a protocol that embeds password requirements into the form field html and that password managers can use to create a matching PW Ellen Beldner Twitter What follows is a running diary of my thoughts for the next five minutes where I: Get super excited about her idea Figure out how it could…
What I Read in 2021
I read 39 books in 2021. Here they are.
What I Read in 2020
I read far fewer books in 2020 than in past years. Pandemic stress and the lack of commute as I moved to 100% remote work really cut down on my reading time. Here they are.