You’ll see articles and papers coming out every day about new machine learning methods. Ignore them. There’s no way to keep up with them all and it’ll only hold you back from getting your foundations set. Most of the best machine learning techniques have been around for decades. What’s changed has been an increase in computing power and the availability of data. Don’t be distracted by the new.Thinking of Self-Studying Machine Learning? Remind yourself of these 6 things
Ignoring problems also takes away a learning opportunity. Mistakes are typically due to human oversight. If the mistake is not caught in a timely manner, similar mistakes are likely to keep happening because the person committing the mistake hasn’t had a chance to learn from it.Agile Gone Wrong
Put in a good day’s work, then close the damn laptop. Waste some time on the rest of the human experience. At this time of the year, eat some damn duck. Watch a shitty Xmas movie. Help decorate that stupid tree. Dare to be so bold as to embrace the ordinary every now and then.Let’s bury the hustle
On which note, I could probably have outsourced most of the blogging process itself, leaving myself to make ‘editorial’ decisions. This wouldn’t have cost much given the simplicity of the content, and would have led to increased traffic and advertising revenue.Literally a shipment of fail dot com — how not to monetise a popular blog
There's a gap between thinking and doing. The gap grows through fears about building the wrong thing or not knowing how to start. It manifests through excessive research, questions to colleagues, and theories and predictions about how something should be built.Build as much as you can
This is a double-entry accounting primer for software developers who write code to track money. It distills the essence of accounting in an effort to help developers bridge the vocabulary and conceptual divide that exists between engineering and finance.Accounting for Developers 101
What you need to know about the next piece is contained in the last piece.10x Not 10%
Cargo cults describe situations where people emulate a set of behaviours, without understanding their underlying motivations. When this happens with data-science, organizations will emulate the technology behind data science, without creating a data-driven organizational culture.Cargo cult data science
Arc Publishing’s early success with external customers may give the Washington Post reason for optimism, but the effort is itself a beneficiary of the upbeat, can-do spirit which the company’s management has successfully cultivated in the age of Bezos.The Washington Post Is A Software Company Now
While Twilio is the focus of this essay, this essay is not just about Twilio. It could be about about ANY potentially disruptive company with brilliant founders, venture-scale ambitions, great products, a top-notch team, and traction to die for. It could be about you.Twilio's $53.5 Billion Opportunity And Why It's At Risk
Unlike “waterfall projects”, scrum projects are made of so-called sprints, which are portions of a project that usually last for a defined number of weeks in which a multidisciplinary team works together on a challenge.How to Mash-Up and Benefit from PM and the Design Thinking Process
Investors typically don’t want to invest in companies too heavily dependent on a single individual, and will often insist on an external CEO as a condition of funding. It’s also an issue of skills: the traits and talents necessary to conceive and launch a product are often very different than those that help a business expand.We finally have proof that visionary founders make the worst CEOs
Taking external money comes with the pressure of delivering the right metrics (in the eyes of the investors). In most cases, it’s about the number of users. If we were raising money, we would have to get as many users as we can, as fast as we can.Our Thoughts On (Not) Raising Money
New technologies come with many unknowns, creating a need for establishing best practices, standards, and design patterns. It’s assumed that this is why UX designers will have long-term job security in the coming years. There will always be a need for designers employing user-centered design techniques to put warmth into products. New Realities: VR, AR, MR, and the Future of Design
Designers who possess an insatiable curiosity will learn, adapt, upskill, and push your team forward in ways you could never predict. When something new is required of them, their immediate reaction will be to go and read about the subject. Not because it’s their job; because they simply can’t help being so damn interested in every aspect of design.Unicorn designers don’t exist. Generalists do.
We like to think that we’re different from all those industries that judge people based on appearance, but we do the same thing, only instead of saying that people are a bad fit because they don’t wear ties, we say they’re a bad fit because they do, and instead of saying people aren’t smart enough because they don’t have the right pedigree… wait, that’s exactly the same.When we only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest
The point of these exercises, it turns out, is to make the abstract idea of “our brand” into something concrete. After doing the exercises, the team gets a common language to describe what their company is about — and all subsequent squishy decisions about visuals, voice, and identity become way easier.The Three-Hour Brand Sprint
This is similar to “What problem are you solving?” but the bar is higher. What I really want to understand is what you know about the problem that everyone else doesn’t. This is usually derived from multiple conversations with customers, deep analysis of current products in the space, and often personal experience.How to Pitch Your Company
Integrating a third-party product is necessary when the main added functionality solves a key market problem, is not part of your organisation’s distinctive competence, and reduces the development cycle time and costs significantly.Third-Party Software Integration: Best Practice, Perils and Pitfalls
Innovation means never wasting time reinventing the wheel. Step back and take the long view, and you’ll see that companies like Mixpanel copied as well, taking from Kissmetrics, Omniture and Google Analytics. The reason why startups can innovate is that they’re optimized for speed. If there is a hot product in the market, it can make sense to copycat it to move faster.Copycat Your Competitors to Take the Market
The first step we took towards creating better estimates, was starting smaller. This doesn’t mean clients have to give up on their big, grand vision. It just means we break the project into the smallest pieces possible and focus on delivering faster.How we improved our engineering estimates by 1082%
The Web will have a profound effect on the markets and the cultures around the world: intelligent agents will either stabilise or destabilise markets; the demise of distance will either homogenise or polarise cultures; the ability to access the Web will be either a great divider or a great equaliser; the path will either lead to jealousy and hatred or peace and understanding.I Quit Facebook—and You Should, Too
In a marketplace of distraction, the company’s, products and services that can save you TIME, are going to win. That is why Amazon is a market leader. That is why Prime Now wins. They have simplified the process of buying and selling. They have saved you enormous amounts of time.What Startups Really Sell
With victory often comes complacency, and in Apple’s case, that complacency comes in the form of design without thought, a self-congratulatory sense of your gadget stores as “town squares,” and an increasing lack of concern for what is coming next. In technology, that next thing is always the one that breaks you.Apple is really bad at design
If you don’t deliver regularly, you delay learning about what delights customers. Delivering value does not necessarily mean releasing a product or feature to the general public. Sometimes it can be as simple as delivering a half-baked idea to someone and quickly receiving feedback.An Introduction to Modern Agile
