Category: Thoughts
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Don’t Overlook Tech Writers
Early in my career I believed that Tech Writers were a interface role to Marketing and Sales. As a product focused developer, I didn’t understand the true value of Tech Writers beyond cleaning up content to make it customer friendly as in the places where I worked this is the role they most often took.…
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Sandy the Musician (For Sammy and Will)
Sandy was a brilliant kid. School was a matter of course for her, she got mostly As without any major effort. What made Sandy special though was her affinity for music, and she truly loved it and it came to her naturally. Even as a middle schooler she would spend hours each day practicing her…
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The Infosec Apocalypse
The rise of tooling for vulnerability detection combined with pressure driven by Vendor Due Diligence is causing a massive enterprise freezeout for non-mainstream technologies across the board. Of particular concern is the impact this will have on the adoption of functional programming in enterprise and small business B2B development. I see now that the last…
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30 Years of Scrum
There is some controversy as to when Scrum was invented, but many attribute it to Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka in 1986. While still new and cutting edge to many companies this 30 year old process has it’s fair share of both proponents and opponents. Seeing as how I started programming at about this time under…
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My 2013 F# Year in Review
It’s been a great year for F# with the blossoming of the fsharp.org working groups. It’s been amazing watching the community come together to form a movement outside of Microsoft. This is most certainly the long term future of F#, protected from the whims of layer upon layer of management. Who knows, in the coming year we…
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All Machine Learning Platforms are Terrible (but some less so)
I recently took a medium sized feature set with labels at work and ran it through some of the most popular machine learning platforms. The goal was to get a feel for each of them via the standard battery of regressions and evaluate each for use in further experimentation. This is a review of my…
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The Promise of F# Language Type Providers
In most software domains you can safely stick with one or two languages and, because the tools you are using are fairly easy to replicate, you’ll find almost anything you might need to finish your project. This isn’t true in data science and data engineering however. Whether it be some hyper-optimized data structure or a cutting edge machine…
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On Type Safety, Representable States and Erlang
Close your eyes and imagine your program as a function that takes a set of inputs and produces a set of outputs. I know this may seem overly simple, but a set of actions in a GUI can be thought of as a set of inputs, and a set of resulting side effects to a…
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Bad Data is the Real Problem
Big data is the buzzword de jour, and why not? Companies like Google with huge server farms are doing amazing things leveraging huge amounts of data and processing power. It’s all very sexy but these researchers get to pick and choose the data they work with. They can maximize their research gains by pushing the cutting edge…
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My Education in Machine Learning via Coursera, A Review So Far
As of today I’ve completed my fifth course at Coursera, all but one being directly related to Machine Learning. The fact that you can now take classes given by many of most well known researchers in their field who work at some of the most lauded institutions for no cost at all is a testament…