Career & Leadership

I recently became a parent, which has made me look backward as much as forward. I have been thinking about my own childhood, and about the lessons, habits, and struggles that shaped the person I became. I’m sure most parents do this. We…

A motley gang of venture capitalists, LinkedIn influencers, and recently-laid-off product managers have hijacked your company’s hiring pipeline and are threatening to sink it in 30 days with "AI strategy" unless their demands are met. The…

I’ve always been fascinated by how some teams seem to bend time—turning what should take years into mere months or even days—while others, including some I’ve been part of, grind to a halt under the weight of endless meetings and…

Building AI systems that simulate human behavior is a technical challenge and an exploration of what drives us as people. As the head of engineering at Vurvey, my work centers on creating human behavior models that help us predict and…

Let’s face it—choosing the right metric to evaluate your machine learning model can be just as tricky as building the model itself. We’ve all been there, running a model that claims 99% accuracy, only to realize it completely misses the…

(More of My Ultimate Guides) In the ever-evolving landscape of machine learning, the quest for the most efficient and powerful models is a continuous journey. As we delve into the intricate world of algorithms, we often find ourselves at a…

If you’re like me, you’ve started to see the term “Vector Database” start popping up all over your technology news feeds. However, is this actually something that is useful to understand, or is this just another hyped up technology trying…

If you’re like me, you probably have a hard time keeping up with all the new buzzwords and acronyms that are popping up in the world of technology. Machine learning, artificial intelligence, deep learning, neural networks, natural language…

What’s all this fuss about the AI AlphaGo’s recent victory against the masters? While it’s seemed like AI had hit a dead-end as much as a decade ago, if you’re like many of us sci-fi enthusiasts and have always wanted an AI best friend,…

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a lot like life’s relationships. Sometimes what you put into it is pretty straightforward, leading to the output or outcome that you wanted. Other times, let’s just say, the process gets a bit more…

Artificial intelligence has been in the background for decades, kicking up dust in the distance, but never quite arriving. Well that era is over. In 2017, AI has broken through the dust cloud and arrived in a big way. But why? What’s the…

Interest in artificial intelligence is reaching new heights. 2016 was a record year for AI startups and funding, and 2017 will certainly surpass it, if it hasn’t already. According to IDC, spending on cognitive systems and AI will rise…

Unless you’re living under a rock, you’ve probably noticed Artificial Intelligence (AI) is popping up more and more in technology talks and business strategies. I’ve even noticed among my friends an increased interest in “cognifying” their…

The world of programming is always changing. And changing FAST at that. We are constantly finding better ways to do what it is that we do. That is a great thing. Iteration is a very powerful concept. However, there are a few ideas and…

Throughout my career (and life) I’ve been on many different teams. Obviously, this implies that I’ve been a teammate to others and had many teammates of my own. I bring this up because yesterday I had an interaction with a current teammate…

If you know me personally, you know that I love to read. It started in grade school where the elementary school I attended offered points and prizes for those who read (and passed tests on) the most books every month. I remember I…

Software applications are getting more and more complex and each platform for developing applications these days seems like its operating on a higher and higher level of abstraction to hide that complexity from the developer. In…

I am currently (at the time this article was written anyway) working for a large (6,000+ people) Fortune 500 company. However, this was not always the case. Actually, I started my career (straight out of college) for a small biotech…

Sadly, I am coming to the end of my twenties (I plan to be a centenarian so it’s okay). I’ve learned more in my twenties than I ever thought would be possible. I am grateful for the people I have met and experiences I have had along the…

Whenever I interview candidates for a position (whether a developer position or not), I want to know one very important thing about them. Something that, for me, has been the number one key attribute that successful employees all have.…

Design patterns in software development have been around for a little while now. They were made famous in 1994 from the book Design Patters: Elements of Reusable Software and consequently made the authors so famous that they are often now…

Anthem, Sony, Home Depot, Dairy Queen, Kmart…What do all of these companies have in common? They were hacked and lost millions! It seems like not a day goes by anymore where you don’t hear about another company that has had its private…

Being a developer is a lot of fun. When people ask me why I love doing it so much, I usually don’t have just one answer for them. However, one answer I give often draws a few funny looks from the questioner. I love it because everyday I…

Every team needs a great leader. That is especially true for software teams. Between fighting back bugs, developing awesome new features, and rushing to meet deadlines, team members need someone to turn to that they can count on. But who?…

Amazon has been in the news a lot recently. If you have not heard, the New York Times released an article last week that shed some light on what it is like to work at the giant tech enterprise, and (spoiler alert) it didn’t make Amazon…

Being a software developer, we’ve all experienced a time in which we had to explain a technical matter to a non technical co-worker, manager, or customer. This, as we know, is not always an easy task to say the least. Software development…

A month or two ago I wrote a post titled “Every Programmer Should Understand This”. I received a bunch of comments on the post, some of which were from people agreeing with the article and some which thought I should be hung for suggesting…

I’ve had many managers throughout my career. I’ve seen some thrive, and some get fired. Some were loved by their teams, and some were despised. Some only cared about what time people arrived in the office and at what time they left (it had…

It used to be hard to find an abundance of information about a particular subject. You would have to go to the library and find books that were written by subject matter experts and then decide if that information was even up to date with…

Procrastination is something that many people struggle with including myself. For years, no matter what I tried, I would always catch myself procrastinating on tasks that could provide the biggest improvement in my life (apply to grad…

WARNING: Below contains strong opinions that you may not agree with! Read at your own risk…(and if you disagree, tell me why I’m wrong in the comments! I have an open mind 🙂 ) In my last post I wrote about 12 Influential Books Every…

This is a question that I get a lot, especially from co-workers or friends that are just beginning their journey as a software craftsman. What book should I read to become a better developer? Do I need to read books? I think it’s a great…

The more and more I talk to developers and other software engineers, I noticed that reoccurring theme. They all wanted to know the key to doing well in technical interviews. This is a good topic to understand because if you don’t take…