business Startup = ambition It's an axiom that startups are defined by growth. If it's not growing 10% a month, then your company is seen as something less - a "lifestyle business". The association of startups and growth is an incredibly useful one for the investor class. They buy call options on a bunch
management There's no one right way to build a business As I've scaled Dataquest, one of the hardest things for me to come to grips with has been that there is no one right way to build a business. This may be surprising to you. After all, it doesn't seem like a very complicated truth. But the reasons why this
management A guide for bootstrapped startups navigating COVID-19 In just a few weeks, COVID-19 has reached most countries, and changed the lives of billions of people worldwide. The impacts range from the catastrophic (illness and loss of work) to the inconvenient (shelter in place orders). This is a time of uncertainty, with conflicting information coming from official sources.
management How to rapidly improve your management skills It can be overwhelming when you start as a new manager, or when you're an existing manager who is asked to take on more responsibility. The success criteria for your role suddenly change, and in many ways, you're responsible for defining them. Even if you were good at what you
management You don't need to perfect to be a good manager The first year or two after transitioning into management can be incredibly difficult. Most new managers get promoted after they excel in an individual contributor role. But once you become a manager, it becomes clear that none of the skills and behaviors that helped you excel in your previous role
college I barely graduated college, and that's okay I didn’t do very well in high school. My grade point average was around a 2.5 out of 4. I did well in some subjects that I was interested in, like math, computer science, and history, but everything else was a wash. The less homework a class required
android Making an app as a Valentine's day gift For the past year, my girlfriend, Priya has been working on an awesome nonprofit called Tulalens. The idea is to be “yelp for low-income people in emerging markets”. She did a pilot in October/November 2014 where she and the Tulalens team went into the slums of Hyderabad, and surveyed
java How learning to code kept me sane when I was a diplomat In January of 2011, I joined the US Foreign Service. Along with 80 others, I went through a class called A-100, and got a crash course on how to be a diplomat. We learned how to address foreign dignitaries. We got lessons in diplomatic history. There was even an optional
r Exploring US Healthcare data A few days ago, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released some unprecedented data on the US healthcare system. The data consists of 9 million rows showing how much each doctor in the US charged Medicare, for what, and how much Medicare paid out. It doesn’t quite
python Simple speech recognition in Python Sometime today, I got the idea to try to do automatic speech recognition. Speech recognition, even though it is widely used (and is on our phones), still seems kind of sci-fi-ish to me. The thought of running it on your own computer is still pretty exciting. I looked for open
aes An easy way to get started with automated essay scoring Wow, it’s been way too long since I have updated this blog! I am going to start making more frequent updates, and I have some cool things in the pipeline, so bear with me. Last year, I wrote this post on automated essay scoring. This was essentially distilling my
happiness What makes us happy? Lets look at data to find out. I’ve had a lot of different jobs over the past 4 years, and I’ve had some incredible experiences along the way. Lately, I’ve been struggling with what to do next. Or perhaps more accurately, I’ve been struggling with how to decide what to do next. Decisions
lms Open sourcing movide, a student-centric learning platform I haven’t blogged in a while, mostly because I have been trying to figure out what I should do next. One thing that I have been working on lately that I am very passionate about is Movide. Movide is a student-centric learning platform. You might yawn at this point
r The power, and danger, of visualizations I recently posted about visualizing the voting patterns of senators. In the post, I scraped voting data for each senator on every vote in the 113th Congress from the Senate website, and then assigned a code of 0 for a no vote on a particular issue, 1 for a yes
aes On the automated scoring of essays and the lessons learned along the way We’ve all written essays, primarily while we were in school. The sometimes enjoyable process of researching the topic and composing the paper can take hours and hours of careful work. Given this, people react badly to the notion that their essays may be scored not by a human teacher,
r How divided is the Senate? I very seldom pay attention to politics directly, because politics have always seemed a bit circular and cyclical to me. Most of the political news that I take in ends up worming its way into the news sources that I do consume, like the excellent longform.org. Even given my
r Programming instrumental music from scratch I recently posted about automatically making music. The algorithm that I made pulled out interesting sequences of music from existing songs and remixed them. While this worked reasonably well, it also didn’t have full control over the basics of the music; it wasn’t actually specifying which instruments to
music Evolve your own beats -- automatically generating music via algorithms Update: you can find the next post in this series here. I recently went to an excellent music meetup where people spoke about the intersection of music and technology. One speaker in particular talked about how music is now being generated by computer. Music has always fascinated me. It can
r Making infographics using R and Inkscape I have been making charts with R for almost as long as I have been using R, and with good reason: R is an amazing tool for filtering and visualizing data. With R, and particularly if we use the excellent ggplot2 library, we can go from raw data to compelling
r Do the Simpsons characters like each other? One day, while I was walking around Cambridge, I had a random thought – how do the characters on the Simpsons feel about each other? It doesn’t take long to figure out how Homer feels about Flanders (hint: he doesn’t always like him), or how Burns feels about everyone,
r Using the power of sound to figure out which Simpsons character is speaking Update: you can find the next post in this series here. In a previous post, I looked at transcripts of Simpsons episodes and tried to figure out which character was speaking which line. This worked decently, but it wasn’t great. It gave us memorable scenes like this one: Homer
r Figuring out which Simpsons character is speaking Update: you can find the next post in this series here. You probably have a favorite Simpsons character. Maybe you hope to someday block out the sun, Mr. Burns style, maybe you enjoy Homer’s skill in averting meltdowns, or maybe you identify with Lisa’s struggles for acceptance. Through
math Find the determinant of a matrix The determinant of a matrix is a number associated with a square (nxn) matrix. The determinant can tell us if columns are linearly correlated, if a system has any nonzero solutions, and if a matrix is invertible. See the wikipedia entry for more details on this. Computing a determinant is
math Linear Regression from the Ground Up Linear regression is a very basic technique that we use a lot in machine learning. In a lot of cases (and I have been guilty of this), we just use it without much thought as to how the internals actually work. In a 2-D coordinate system, we can plot observations
math Inverting your very own matrix IntroductionI had my natural predilection towards math crushed out of me at some point in school, and after that point, Math (yes, we are referring to the higher power of math) and I had a wary understanding. I dabbled quietly, and Math turned a blind eye to me ignoring some
