I don't want to learn your garbage query language
This is a bit of a rant but I really don't like software that invents its own query language.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
8/30/18, 12:00 AM
Software Development
Business secrets from terrible people
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
8/16/18, 12:00 AM
Software Development
New approximate nearest neighbor benchmarks
As some of you may know, one of my side interests is approximate nearest neighbor algorithms.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
6/17/18, 12:00 AM
Software Development
Missing the point about microservices: it's about testing and deploying independently
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
6/4/18, 12:00 AM
Software Development
Interviewing is a noisy prediction problem
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
5/2/18, 12:00 AM
Software Development
Waiting time, load factor, and queueing theory: why you need to cut your systems a bit of slack
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
3/27/18, 12:00 AM
Software Development
Lessons from content marketing myself (aka blogging) for five years
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
3/7/18, 12:00 AM
Software Development
New benchmarks for approximate nearest neighbors
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
2/15/18, 12:00 AM
Software Development
I'm looking for data engineers
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
1/28/18, 12:00 AM
Software Development
Books I consumed in 2017
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
1/17/18, 12:00 AM
Software Development
Plotting author statistics for Git repos using Git of Theseus
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
1/3/18, 12:00 AM
Software Development
Toxic meeting culture
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
12/29/17, 12:00 AM
Software Development
Learning from users faster using machine learning
I had an interesting idea a few weeks ago, best explained through an example.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
12/12/17, 12:00 AM
Software Development
Annoy 1.10 released, with Hamming distance and Windows support
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
11/26/17, 12:00 AM
Software Development
Why conversion matters: a toy model
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
10/30/17, 12:00 AM
Software Development
On the Equifax breach and how to really prevent identity theft
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
9/26/17, 12:00 AM
Software Development
The number of letters in the word for each number
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
9/6/17, 12:00 AM
Software Development
The software engineering rule of 3
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
8/29/17, 12:00 AM
Software Development
Machine, Platform, Crowd
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
8/19/17, 12:00 AM
Software Development
Google diversity memo, global warming, Pascal's wager, and other stuff
There's about 765 million blog posts about the diversity “memo” that leaked out of Google a couple of weeks ago.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
8/14/17, 12:00 AM
Software Development
Fun with trigonometry: the world's most twisted coastline
I just spent a few days in Italy, on the Ligurian coast. Even though we were on the west side of Italy, the Mediterranean sea was to the east, because the house was situated on a long bay.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
7/12/17, 12:00 AM
Software Development
Optimizing for iteration speed
I've written before about the importance of iterating quickly but I didn't necessarily talk about some concrete things you can do. When I've built up the tech team at Better, I've intentionally optimized for fast iteration speed above almost everything else.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
7/6/17, 12:00 AM
Software Development
Blogroll
Remember when everyone had a really ugly blog with a blogroll? Anyway, just think the word is funny. I follow a few hundred blogs using Feedly and Reeder and have been reading a few hundred thousand blog posts over the last 10 years.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
6/9/17, 12:00 AM
Software Development
Conversion rates – you are (most likely) computing them wrong
How hard can it be to compute conversion rate? Take the total number of users that converted and divide them with the total number of users. Done. Except… it's a lot more complicated when you have any sort of significant time lag.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
5/23/17, 12:00 AM
Software Development
The mathematical principles of management
I've read about 100 management books by now but if there's something that always bothered me it's the lack of first principles thinking.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
4/9/17, 12:00 AM
Software Development