Backpressure for dummies
A toy example showing how lacking backpressure may lead to failures and how to add it.
Links 2021-01
Interesting readings of the month
Why books don’t work by Andy Matuschak, mind-blowing article of the month. It claims that the most common mediums used in education (ie books, lectures) take a form that is not aligned with how we best learn, according to cognitive science. Most books and lectures assume that the learning process happens by transmission, by simply being exposed to knowledge. While in order to learn it is necessary to actively think about the material, practice with and create connections. Given that by replacing books and lectures with a medium with a form that makes the thinking/practicing happen naturally it would become much easier to make people learn
Augmenting Long term memory by Michael Nielsen. Really nice article describing why it makes sense to use spaced repetition, specifically through Anki, to solidify your learnings in memory. The article is very thorough and provides a lot of real (and personal) examples of how to use the Anki system
Regrets of the dying. The article has been written by Bronnie Ware, a palliative care worker. By having been exposed for a long time to the last days of many patients she has been able to summarise their main last regrets. From time to time it’s good to read how the awareness that the end is approaching makes people value how they spent their life. “When breath becomes air” is a book I really appreciated on this topic
I really enjoyed two pieces from Morgan Housel, fund manager at Collaborative Fund, and former Motley Fool columnist. The first one contains a few nice bits of wisdom. It won’t change your life but it may make you ponder on some aspects of it. The second one is about how dynamics susceptible to feedback loops may very quickly evolve in unexpected directions. To clarify this idea he describes how a decrease in the elephant population leads to stronger tusk demand, which leads to a further decrease in the population and even stronger demand, and so on until extinction. He claims that a similar feedback loop applied to decaying brands (Sears) and growing trends (GameStop).
2023
Patching python objects through pytest fixtures
A simple piece on how to patch objects and use pytest fixtures in tests at the same time
2022
A convoluted, but effective, python environments management setup for Emacs
Using various tools to make python environments working automagically also with emacs
Documenting is scaling yourself, but also a career choice
On the benefits of documenting your work and how it can impact your share of the pie
2021
2021 Review
Looking back at 2021 to look forward at 2022
99 Bottles of OOP highlights
Several ideas worth remembering from Sandi Metz’s book 99 bottles of OOP
A better pattern for pickling machine learning models
Can we do better than a straightforward pickle.dump?
Job interviews: mistakes and learnings
Why interviewing time to time is useful and what I learned so far by doing so
Links 2021-03
Interesting readings of the month
Links 2021-02
Interesting readings of the month
OOP design patterns applied in data science: Strategy
Use case of the Strategy pattern in a data science application
Links 2021-01
Interesting readings of the month
2020
The value of writing
Considerations on how practicing writing can help improving how we communicate and how we think
Few intuitions on eigenvectors, eigenvalues and their use in PCA
an overview of what eigenvectors and eigenvalues are and why they make PCA work
Sending multiple POST requests from a spidered page using Scrapy
A possible pattern for replicating programmatically AJAX POST requests when scraping webpages using Scrapy