Blog
✍🏼 I've been writing here since 2016, mostly about software engineering. In total, I've written 28 articles on this site.
The first 99,999 writes are ‘free’: Or, why lazy StringIO.write() may sprint into a memmove wall
Debugging a Python StringIO performance oddity for fun and practice.
ddiaflashcards.com - Flashcards for Designing Data Intensive Applications
Releasing a study deck for a much loved software textbook.
The Books I Read - 2021
The 38 books I read in our second COVID-19 year (with some reviews).
From Data Engineer to SysAdmin: Put down the K8s cluster, your pipelines can run without it
Big Data meets Big Container, and now no one is getting anything done.
What's in a name? The Data Scientist vs. Machine Learning Engineer title bore.
Why has data scientist fallen out of favour, with machine learning engineer being ascendant?
How can an ML model perform highly and poorly at the same time?
An instance of unhelpful term overloading in machine learning engineering.
A Basic Python Toolchain in Bazel
How to improve on the default auto-detecting Python toolchain shipped with Bazel.
Using Terraform to make my many side-projects 'pick up and play'
A post contending that Terraform is a no-brainer addition to your side-project development toolkit.
Bazel is taking over
On the Bazel build system's potential to become a category-killer.
The Bazel 'Elevator Pitch'
There's an elevator pitch for Bazel from early 2018 that I point people at and crib from so often that I thought it was well time I copied it out and put it online.
How To Ask For Help In Slack
The help-needer's and question-asker's checklist
The Books I Read - 2020
Every book I read in our COVID-19 year, with reviews.
Is an Australian Computer Science degree with no math still a Computer Science degree?
This was written in late 2018 and is only just being published, but it’s still relevant.
The Books I Read - 2019
A retrospective on my best year of reading in a decade.
Current Thoughts on Effective Altruism and My Personal Giving
Recording my thinking on commitment to donating 10% of my income.
Newsfeeds and Information Filters
We need information-filtering tools and we need them yesterday.
The ‘Fake News’ problem and its NLP ‘solutions’
Have people already started to cargo-cult NLP models? Of course they have.
Junior Theme: Why You Should Use It
Sharing a new theme I developed for myself
An Undergrad's perspective on ICML 2017
What's ICML like, particularly for a 3rd undergraduate with no formal ML schooling?