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
This is a bit of a rant but I really don't like software that invents its own query language.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
I get bored reading management books very easily and lately I've been reading about a wide range of almost arbitrary topics. One of the lenses I tend to read through is to see different management styles in different environments.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
As some of you may know, one of my side interests is approximate nearest neighbor algorithms.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
Ok, so I have to first preface this whole blog post by a few things: I really struggle with the term microservices. I can't put my finger on exactly why. Maybe because the term is hopelessly ill-defined, maybe because it's gotten picked up by the hype train.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
I have done roughly 2,000 interviews in my life. When I started recruiting, I had so much confidence in my ability to assess people. Let me just throw a couple of algorithm questions at a candidate and then I'll tell you if they are good or not!
From: Erik Bernhardsson
I've been reading up on operations research lately, including queueing theory. It started out as a way to understand the very complex mortgage process (I work at a mortgage startup) but it's turned into my little hammer and now I see nails everywhere.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
I started writing this blog in late 2012, partly because I felt like it would help me improve my English and my writing skills, partly because I kept having a lot of random ideas in my head and I wanted to write them down somewhere.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
UPDATE(2018-06-17): There are is a later blog post with newer benchmarks! One of my super nerdy interests include approximate algorithms for nearest neighbors in high-dimensional spaces. The problem is simple. You have say 1M points in some high-dimensional space.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
I'm interrupting the regular programming for a quick announcement: we're looking for data engineers at Better. You would be the first one to join and would work a lot directly with me. Some fun things you could work on (these are all projects I'm working on right now):
From: Erik Bernhardsson
Turns out having a toddler isn't super compatible with reading. I used to read ~100 books/year as a teenager, but it has slowly deteriorated to maybe 20-30 books, at most. And I don't even finish all of them because life is too short!
From: Erik Bernhardsson
I spent a few days during the holidays fixing up a bunch of semi-dormant open source projects and I have a couple of blog posts in the pipeline about various updates.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
I spent six years at a company that went from 50 people to 1500 and one contributing factor leading to my departure was that I went from a “maker” to a person stuck in meetings every day.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
I had an interesting idea a few weeks ago, best explained through an example.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
I've been a bit bad at posting things with a regular cadence lately, partly because I'm trying to adjust to having a toddler, partly because the hunt for clicks has caused such a high bar for me that I feel like I have to post something Pulitzer-worthy.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
There are often close relationships between top level business metrics. For instance, it's well known that retention has a super strong impact on the valuation of a subscription business. Or that the % of occupied seats is super important for an airline.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
A funny thing about being a foreigner is how you realize people take broken things for granted. I'm going to go out on a limb here claiming that the US has a pretty dumb banking system.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
Just for fun, I generated these graphs of the number of letters in the word for each number. I really spent about 10 minutes on this (ok…possibly also another 40 minutes tweaking the plots): More languages!
From: Erik Bernhardsson
Here's a dumb extremely accurate rule I'm postulating* for software engineering projects: *you need at least 3 examples before you solve the right problem*. This is what I've noticed: Don't factor out shared code between two classes.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
I just bought Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future and discovered that it mentions my blog – in particular the post When machine learning matters. Ok, I lied a little bit. I didn't discover it serendipitously.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
