I’ve never tried to write end-of-the-year posts; they tend to be biased towards recent events, and I find it disingenuous to summarize a year’s worth of events meaningfully into a small, overarching set of themes. This year however, I have an additional tool to organize my thoughts and make the task more tenable: I have […]
a16z is a well-known venture capital firm in the valley. I recently discovered that they produce a weekly podcast, and after a few episodes, have been impressed with the range of topics they’re covering. While they have some obvious bias and promotion towards their own portfolio companies, they make an honest effort to talk with […]
I’ve been an advocate of JavaScript client-side frameworks for some time. Their true value is in managing complexity: as an application grows more complex and incorporates more functionality, frameworks provide a level of guidance and consistency across the codebase. They enforce the right abstractions, encapsulate reusable and generalizable components, which ultimately serve to keep the […]
I enjoyed Interstellar. Despite a few plot holes and questionable motives in the overall story, I was impressed by the grand spectacle of space, mixed with the relatable human elements embodied by its main characters. The film does an excellent job in reminding us that great stories are about people. The Science of Interstellar is […]
I’m used to reading a fair amount. Back in grade school, I carried these giant fantasy novels around the house, and re-read the series on a regular basis. When my family got AOL, I was regularly lurking on a number of the forums, across any number of topics spanning video games and religion and (surprisingly) […]
The Startup of You is all about mapping the strategies and tactics that make startups – in theory – successful, and apply them to careers. The central tenets revolve around taking moderate amounts of risk, having backup plans, and not being afraid of hard work. Put together, they combine to form a playbook that aspires […]
China’s economy just officially overtook the United States as the biggest economy in the world[1]. Most saw this passing of the torch as an inevitability; the Chinese government has been laser focused on economic growth, and it has been able to leverage its populous workplace to shift upwards in the world economy much faster than […]
There is a curious rebellion against higher education. I get the sense that it’s an overreaction, a correction to the unquestioned emphasis placed onto college over the past few decades. The millennial generation is no longer seeing the gains enjoyed by previous generations[1], and education itself has moved away from teaching critical thinking and evaluation, […]
Sam Altman wrote a short post which questions a premise: Why aren’t today’s startups more innovative? He notes that society has benefited from the consumer-centric technological focus in the last decade; starting with the smartphone and a persistent data connection, we have enabled communication and transportation, while disrupting industries from hospitality to media – which […]
I’ve been slogging through My NBA 2k15 on my phone. The game is based on collecting cards to battle other players offline, and its core is identical to that of another game, WWE SuperCard. In fact, they simply reused their game engine, likely built for white-label collectable card games, and release new games by licensing […]
xkcd is one of a kind: the popular stick-figure webcomic for nerds and geeks seems to offer relevant commentary for pretty much any occasion. Its blend of computing, physics, math, and insights on life works well at a time when – as adults, anyway – it’s much more culturally acceptable to get excited about the […]
I recently did an interview with Talentbuddy. They’re a mentorship program that looks to get people started on full-stack web development in about three months time, and wanted me to speak to our front-end technologies at Square, specifically on our decision to use the Ember.js framework and our lessons learned. I was happy to oblige. […]