Vik's Blog

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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’

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

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

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)

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

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

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

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

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

ml

Predicting season records for NFL teams - part 2

This is the second, technical, part of this series. See the first part for the overview. IntroductionThis post will introduce the technical details behind the nfl season record prediction that was introduced in part one. After selecting the error metric and defining an acceptable

machine-learning

Predicting season records for NFL teams - overview

This is the first, non-technical, part of this series. See the second part for more detail. IntroductionI was recently looking for a good machine learning task to try out, and I thought that doing something NFL-related would be interesting, because the NFL season is