Technology, software, data science, machine learning, entrepreneurship, investing, and various other topics
This post is about Eric Ries's book "The Lean Startup". This book's message has a wider applicability than one might think, because contrary to what the title suggests, its methodology applies to more than just startups. There's…
Learning data science is a process of exploration. It involves continually expanding the surface area of concepts and techniques that you have at your disposal by learning new topics that build on or share a knowledge base with t…
I wrote the following thoughts in response to some questions from the CIO of the company I work for about mining Bitcoin. I decided to post my response (lightly edited) here because I think it summarizes my view on cryptocurrenci…
Sometimes it pays to go back to basics. Data science is a massive, complicated field with seemingly endless topics to learn about. But in our rush to learn about the latest deep learning trends, it's easy to forget that there are…
This post is about Yuval Noah Harari's book Sapiens. All of my favorite books have changed the way I view the world in some non-trivial way. There's nothing quite like the experience of reading a book and then, afterward, realiz…
Prophet is an open source forecasting tool built by Facebook. It can be used for time series modeling and forecasting trends into the future. Prophet is interesting because it's both sophisticated and quite easy to use, so it's po…
This post is about Peter Thiel's book Zero to One. I'm generally fascinated by how very smart people view the world, particularly if those views are unpopular. Peter Thiel, a well-known entrepreneur/investor and famously contrar…
This post is about Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking, Fast and Slow. This is a book that everyone should probably read at some point in their lives, or at least read some cliff notes on to get an understanding of the basic ideas.…
The "big data" technology landscape is changing really, really fast. One consequence of this is that it's hard to find good training resources since they become outdated so quickly. I wanted to get some baseline comfort with a v…
I have a confession to make. I love podcasts. I have a semi-unhealthy addiction to podcasts. I get most of my twitter follows and book recommendations from podcasts. They've become an essential part of my daily information die…
John Wittenauer