Blog

My life is held together with the Todoist app … but it’s just not a good fit for work in the corporate world. And that led me to a practical side project.

A few people have recently asked me what newsletters I read or podcasts I listen to. As of right now, here’s the list of what I keep up with…

I wanted to add some color to a few of my probability estimates. You may want to check those out first if you haven’t seen them.

Ideally, when we say we think something is likely (or unlikely), we should revisit our prediction later once we know the actual outcome… so this year some friends and I will be competing by predicting various 2024 events.

Today was my last day at ReviewTrackers. I’ll miss RT. Over almost two years, I got to experience “startup” life and I transitioned to full time software engineering (after years as a nominal data scientist who happened to do some dev work). My fellow engineers there were good teachers and listeners, and engineering management was always open to feedback. I’ll be starting a new gig at Capital One on Monday, working on cybersecurity tooling.

For the last year or so, I’ve been chipping away at a side project: a weightlifting-tracking app. The ostensible purpose is to store the metrics I want and make data entry as convenient as possible, but in practice it’s mainly a way for me to become more familiar with the development of a “large” web application and the challenges that come with it.

Rust reminds me a lot of Go. Both languages eschewed exception-style error handling, a feature present in almost every language that’s popular in industry. However, the idioms they use instead are very different.

Last week, Nvidia’s stock exploded…. The AI arms race has heated up and is even getting the attention of normal people through stock prices (among other news), so I’m sure this won’t be the last time I explain GPUs to someone without a computer science degree. I’m using this post as a chance to organize my Chips 101 talking points.

I taught a tutorial at PyCon a few days ago. It went well, but what I want to discuss are some technical things I did that went well and (I think) made the presentation easier for students to follow.

This post is a followup to my article The Basics of Exceptions in Python, but should make sense on its own as long as you are familiar with raise and try/except.

Let’s cover a few more advanced aspects of the Python exception system. We’ll move a bit faster and talk at a higher level than we did in the last post.

Topics we’ll hit:

• More Python Built-in Exceptions
• User-defined Exception Classes
• Finally Blocks
• Keeping try Blocks Small