Advice

  • New Car

    It took nearly 4 months from the time we made a down payment at the Kia dealership until taking possession of our new Kia Niro.  It didn’t seem like it was that exotic of a car that it takes 1/3rd of a year to deliver one.  But now we have what is probably the only…

  • Not Infallible

    I’ve been reading the Walter Isaacson biography of Benjamin Franklin which is quite insightful both in terms of the genius of the man himself, and the historical perspective. One trait he had which I think I also share is a healthy appreciation of my own and everyone else’s fallibilities. In my world view the human body…

  • Bot Trading Final Thoughts

    My software project for February was a stock trading bot that made trades based on twitter feeds. It was an interesting project that gave me a chance to learn a few new things. I had the chance to apply a couple of machine learning techniques.  In particular using natural language processing to perform sentiment analysis and…

  • Small Projects

    There’s nothing quite like the feeling of starting a new project idea and seeing it all the way through to finished and published.  It’s a feather in your cap that you can look back on and say “I built that”.  Regardless of if it is a big hit or not, it will make you a…

  • Applying Machine Learning Lessons to Humans

    The more that I learn about Deep Learning and other Machine Learning concepts the more intrigued by the idea that we could apply some of things we learn about how these ML models behave back onto human psychology.  This is not something I have heard discussed yet. They were, after all, roughly modelled on how…

  • Summer Recap

    With summer coming to an end I thought I would recap all the things we managed to get done in our first Ontario summer. The general theme for the summer was HOT!  Right from the start we had one heat wave after another.  Particularly memorable was that while I was in Mexico, it was hotter…

  • Embracing Obstacles

    This book is currently on sale for just $3 and it’s a hell of a deal.  I picked this up after hearing it referenced from several different groups of people in the span of a week, enough to make me curious. “The obstacle is the way” presents an argument that much of what prevents us from…

  • Fear Of The Unfamiliar

    A number of things have come up in the last few weeks for a project I’m involved in that has shaken my beliefs and shifted my perspective. The team I work with have all developed a deep level of experience within their domain of expertise.  This is part of the competitive advantage we use to…

  • Why You Need a Meta Project

    I got this idea from the guys at Yelp and how they manage their deployments and several internal infratructure tools. The basic concept is this: If you had a source of information about all your projects in a simple easy to work with format what kind of tooling would be easy to implement with it?…

  • Server Security: Lesson #1

    A recent project I have been working on involved a custom built Linux distro running on an ARMv6 piece of hardware. We figured we were fairly immune to getting hacked based on obscure old hardware and pared-down Linux distro. Unfortunately, early in development for ease of working on things we chose a guessable root password.…