How to teach yourself data science, earning data science jobs through projects, and other lessons from my interview on the Towards Data Science podcast. — Talking is a lot like writing in that it forces you to formulate vague ideas into understandable, concrete concepts. Often, we think we know an idea, but we don’t truly comprehend the theory unless we can communicate it clearly in words to someone else. …

How 136 books can update our prior knowledge of the world — Reading 136 books in a year does not get you to enlightenment. It may lead in the other direction, towards greater confusion. How? In those 55,000 pages, you are bound to find inconsistencies, such as pieces of advice that directly contradict each other. You are also guaranteed to read about…

One Year, 136 books, innumerable lessons — Before we get started: reading books does not make you a better person, and it doesn’t necessarily make you smarter. Reading is just a form of entertainment, and a reading habit isn’t superior to a movie-watching or exercising habit. I choose to spend my free time reading, but I don’t…

Effective strategies for goal attainment — Rule number one for achieving goals: don’t take advice from athletic apparel company slogans. “I am what I am,” “impossible is nothing,” and of course, “just do it” may be effective at selling sporting goods, but they contradict proven methods for reaching your objectives. …

Lessons from a year in the working world — After 16–20 years of schooling designed to produce efficient, docile factory workers, students are released into the “real” world, where none of the rules they’ve learned apply. Working with others is now called collaboration instead of cheating, there are no simple right/wrong answers, and, instead of being told to sit…

Five takeaways from learning to put machine learning in production at Cortex Building Intelligence — Over the past year, I’ve gone from the simple world of writing Jupyter Notebooks to developing machine learning pipelines that deliver real-time recommendations to building engineers around the clock. While I have room for improvement (I still make plenty of coding and data science mistakes), I’ve managed to learn a…

On the Ordinary Nature of High Performance — There are two groups of people in the world, those who see the following as an opportunity and those who find it absolutely terrifying: Innate talent is not the cause of success in any field. The first group of people read this and say “great, that means there’s nothing stopping…

Solving a Common Math Problem with Everyday Applications — Incredibly, after 16 years of schooling, the majority of American college students get this question wrong: What is the total percentage change in the following situation? Decrease of 40% followed by an increase of 60%. A. Increase of 10% B. Increase of 20% C. Decrease of 4% D. None of…

Using the Wayback Machine to Find Lost Pages — 404 pages have gotten more creative over the years: