As I am en route to see my first total solar eclipse, I was curious how hard it would be to compute eclipses in Python. It turns out, ignoring some minor coordinate system head-banging, I was able to get something half-decent working in a couple of hours.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
CIA produced a fantastic book during the peak of World War 2 called Simple Sabotage. It laid out various ways for infiltrators to ruin productivity of a company. Some of the advice is timeless, for instance the section about “General interference with Organizations and Production”:
From: Erik Bernhardsson
Long story short: I'm working on a super cool tool called Modal. Please check it out — it lets you run things in the cloud without having to think about infrastructure. Scaling out, scheduling, containerization, using GPUs, setting up webhooks, and all kinds of other stuff.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
This is is in many respects a successor to a blog post I wrote last year about what I want from software infrastructure, but the ideas morphed in my head into something sort of wider.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
Hi! It's your friendly project management theorician. You might remember me from blog posts such as Why software projects take longer than you think, which is a blog post I wrote a long time ago positing that software projects completion time follow a log-normal distribution.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
Here's a theory I have about cloud vendors (AWS, Azure, GCP): Cloud vendors1 will increasingly focus on the lowest layers in the stack: basically leasing capacity in their data centers through an API. Other pure-software providers will build all the stuff on top of it.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
This isn't as much of a blog post as an elaboration of a tweet I posted the other day: I think this specialization of data teams into 99 different roles (data scientist, data engineer, analytics engineer, ML engineer etc) is generally a bad thing driven by the fact that tools are bad and too hard to...
From: Erik Bernhardsson
I guess I should really call this a parable. The backdrop is: you have been brought in to grow a tiny data team (~4 people) at a mid-stage startup (~$10M annual revenue), although this story could take place at many different types of companies.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
Software infrastructure (by which I include everything ending with *aaS, or anything remotely similar to it) is an exciting field, in particular because (despite what the neo-luddites may say) it keeps getting better every year! I love working with something that moves so quickly.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
I joined Better in early 2015 because I thought the team was crazy enough to actually change one of the largest industries in the US. For six years, I ran the tech team, hiring 300+ people, probably doing 2,000+ interviews, and according to GitHub I added 646,941 lines of code and removed 339,164.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
It's a popular attitude among developers to rant about our tools and how broken things are.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
I spent a ton of time looking at different software providers, both as a CTO, and as a nerd “advanced” consumer who builds stuff in my spare time. In the last 10 years, there has been an order of magnitude more products that cater directly to developers, through APIs, SDKs, and tooling.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
We live in a year of about 350,000 amateur epidemiologists and I have no desire to join that “club”. But I read something about COVID-19 deaths that I thought was interesting and wanted to see if I could replicated it through data.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
Compensation has always been one of the most confusing parts of management to me.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
Hanlon's razor is a classic aphorism I'm sure you have heard before: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. I've found that neither malice nor stupidity is the most common reason when you don't understand why something is in a certain way.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
Let's consider a toy model where you're hiring for two things and that those are equally valuable. It's not very important what those are, so let's just call them “thing A” and “thing B” for now.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
I recently finished the excellent book Kochland. This isn't my first interest in Koch—I read The Science of Success by Charles Koch himself a couple of years ago. Charles Koch inherited a tiny company in 1967 and turned it into one of the world's largest ones.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
Just a quick note that my team is always hiring at Better. A lot of new people have been joining the team here in NYC lately—the tech team has actually grown from 35 to 60 in just ~3 months.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
My company has a buffet every Friday, and the lines grow to epic proportions when the food arrives. I've suspected for years that the “classic” buffet line system is a deeply flawed and inefficient method, and every time I'm stuck in the line has made me more convinced.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
No one asked for this, but I'm something like ~12 years into my career and have had my fair share of mistakes and luck so I thought I'd share some. Honestly, I feel like I've mostly benefitted from luck.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
This is a blog post originally featured on the Better engineering blog. If you want to link to this article or share it, please go to the original post URL! Separately, I'm sorry it's been so long with no posts on this blog.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
Anyone who built software for a while knows that estimating how long something is going to take is hard. It's hard to come up with an unbiased estimate of how long something will take, when fundamentally the work in itself is about solving something.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
When I started building up a tech team for Better, I made a very conscious decision to pay at the high end to get people. I thought this made more sense: they cost a bit more money to hire, but output usually more than compensates for it.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
A modern tech stack typically involves at least a frontend and backend but relatively quickly also grows to include a data platform.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
It started with a tweet: New years resolution: every plot I make during 2018 will contain uncertainty estimates — Erik Bernhardsson (@bernhardsson) January 7, 2018 Why? Because I've been sitting in 100,000,000 meetings where people endlessly debate whether the monthly number of widgets is goi...
From: Erik Bernhardsson
