August 2018
Aug. 25, 2018
Computational and Inferential Thinking: The Foundations of Data Science. Free online textbook written for the UC Berkeley Foundations of Data Science class. The examples are all provided as Jupyter notebooks, using the mybinder web application to allow students to launch interactive notebooks for any of the examples without having to install any software on their own machines.
Serverless for data scientists (via) Slides and accompanying notes from a talk by Mike Lee Williams at PyBay, providing an overview of Zappa and diving a bit more deeply into pywren, which makes it trivial to parallelize a function across a set of AWS lambda instances (serverless Python map() execution essentially). I really like this format for sharing presentations—I used something similar for my own PyBay talk.
Aug. 27, 2018
In too many organizations, deploy code is a technical backwater, an accumulation of crufty scripts and glue code, forked gems and interns’ earnest attempts to hack up Capistrano. It usually gives off a strong whiff of “sloppily evolved from many 2 am patches with no code review”.
This is insane. Deploy software is the most important software you have. Treat it that way: recruit an owner, allocate real time for development and testing, bake in metrics and track them over time.
Aug. 31, 2018
Advice for a new executive, by Chad Dickerson (via) Lara Hogan shares the advice she was given by Chad Dickerson (CTO and then CEO of Etsy) when she first became VP Engineering at Kickstarter. There is so much good material in here. I can vouch for the “peer support group” recommendation: Natalie and I benefited from that through Y Combinator and ended up building our own founder peer support group when we moved our startup back to London. Having a confidential trusted group with which to discuss the challenges of growing a company was invaluable.