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My colleague Dominick Ghirardo and I wrote a short piece for our company’s tech blog on approaching automation in data science.

I’ve set up three Raspberry Pis over the last two days. By set up, I mean I burned the disk image to the SD card, got the Pi connected to the network and open to SSH, installed the tools I’m going to want every time, etc. Basically, make it just another identical worker node. I own six Pis total (for now), so I’ve done this before, and I’ll do it again. In fact, two of the installs I did were on Pis I’d owned for a while; I just wanted to wipe them and start fresh.

So after the first two this weekend took me a lot longer than they should have, I realized it was about time I documented my process and made it repeatable.

In March, I finally built a computer for the first time. I think this qualified as a seminal moment in the life of a young geek. I’ve enjoyed programming on my new “rig” quite a bit, but I also felt like it would be a waste not to try gaming on it.

So in early June, I pulled the trigger on a nice GPU (an EVGA GeForce GTX 1080) and, on the advice of a friend, purchased The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. I’m not a gamer, so this was my first foray into the world of PC RPGs (Role Playing Games, for all you n000000bs out there). It was a glorious, incredibly high-definition experience.

With Fernando Garcia, I recently cowrote an article for the Syntact Project on how cognitive bias manifests itself in sports and why awareness of your biases matters.

I published a longer piece on Syntact, exploring data on internet speeds gathered on a raspberry pi in my apartment.

For as long as I can remember, I didn’t like school. I didn’t hate it either, but it was always a drag. Grade school was somewhat tolerable, but adolescent awkwardness hit in junior high (switching to a new school didn’t help) and I can remember dreading each day. Then in high school, I came home every evening with a litany of complaints, usually about teachers and classwork and – more than anything else – just plain boredom. Though I loved my time in college, I skipped as much class as anyone. There were just too many sports to play, too many friends to keep up with, too many outside interests and projects that I wanted to pursue on my own. Lectures and labs were an unfortunate necessity, and for most courses, they were to be avoided when possible.