How do we make good decisions about our software design? The “easiest” solution to this is for someone with a gigantic brain to make all the decisions. The “Megamind” approach certainly has some advantages — an individual can make decisions quickly, and there’s a single person with responsibility (or “single…

A language model is a probability distribution over a sequence of words. As an example, a language model for English should be able to predict the next item in a sequence, or ideally generalize to responding to a question with a well-formed response. As engineers, we use language models all…

Psychological safety is a wonderfully misunderstood term. It evokes images of hippies singing kum ba yah. It’s not that! Let’s rope in Amy Edmonson (who popularized the term) to let loose on what psychological safety isn’t: It does not mean that people always agree with one another for the sake…

Every so often, I like to dabble in a programming language to get exposure to a new way of thinking. C++ introduced me to design-patterns (the classic GoF book) and the perils of memory-management (More Effective C++, Effective C++, Template Meta-Programming). Lisp taught me the value of small pieces, little…

Ignore the title. Even if your eyes are attracted to the word “Lisp”, ignore that too. Paradigms of AI Programming (PAIP) is just the best introduction to data-driven programming that you’ll ever find. By the time you reach Chapter 2, you’ll see the difference between a straight-forward solution (not extensible)…

I’m really enjoying the Deep Learning course from Andrew Ng on Coursera. I’d highly recommend it! This article gives the insights I got (having done a bit of machine learning 20 years ago). What did I know about roughly similar stuff years ago? In a galaxy far away (about 20 years ago) I did a PhD in Computer Science. The…

You’ve read a lot about culture (you might even have read The Importance of Culture) and now you want to change your culture. How’d you do that? Well, long story short. You don’t. To understand why let’s travel back in time to the GM Fremont Plant in 1982. Here it…

Why Culture Matters. This is Air Florida, Flight 90, sat on the runway in Washington DC. The crew of this plane were based in Florida and one thing you’ll know about Florida is you don’t often get weather like this. As they sat on the runway, the Captain and co-pilot began to work…

For as long as I’ve been in software, there’s been talk of the 10x developer. These are the people you want to solve your problems; they’ll do it in 1/10th of the time, with 1/10th of the number of lines of code. They sound awesome. But were did the term…