Later Instagram and Twitter

For people who’ve asked where I’ve been lately on various social media, here’s a quick answer. My only public social platform right now is LinkedIn. In the last few weeks, I deleted my Instagram and Twitter accounts. This means I’m totally removed from those platforms. You won’t find me there. Similar to what I did … [Read more…]

Tips for running a virtual meetup

The coronavirus pandemic has suddenly changed quite a few things with respect to meetups and how people network. Having helped run several popular tech meetups over the years, I’ve got a good handle on how to run physical meetups. We did our first virtual meetup – the Utah Data Engineering Meetup – on March 18th … [Read more…]

Networking From Home (NFH)

In the last few weeks, we’ve suddenly found ourselves in a brand new world. Some might rightfully call it a hellscape. In a matter of a few weeks, the economy went from blazing hot to an ice age. Last Friday, the US government carpet bombed the economy with $2.2 Trillion. The day before, 3.2 million … [Read more…]

Should you get a tech certification? It depends.

Are IT certifications a waste of time? An article about the worthlessness of IT certifications recently made the rounds on the front page of Hacker News. The author dismissed the validity of Java certifications, equating them to Hamburger University diplomas. While I disagree with the author’s view, I’ve also heard – and said – various … [Read more…]

Building A Pile Of Reputational Capital

What’s more important when starting a business? Making a pile of money quickly, or building a great reputation for the long haul? When we started Ternary Data in late 2018, we very quickly decided that while growing our revenues was vital, it was more important to grow our pile of reputational capital. It seems counter-intuitive, … [Read more…]

Dark Matter Companies

An old Scott Hanselman article about “dark matter developers” made the rounds on Hacker News this summer. Much like the dark matter that makes up much of the invisible universe, these developers are also largely invisible. As Scott said, “We call them Dark Matter Developers. They don’t read a lot of blogs, they never write … [Read more…]

Berkshire Hathaway Shareholders’s Meeting 2019 – General Thoughts and Tips for your future meeting

Another Berkshire shareholders meeting in the books. As always, I walked away slightly smarter. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal posted a funny article “When Warren Buffett Takes the Stage, Try Your Hand at Berkshire Bingo”. If you’ve watched or attended the meeting enough times, you’ll laugh. It’s spot on. Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger are … [Read more…]

Advice On Running A Tech Meetup

Since 2014, my buddy Faris Chebib and I (along with a few other hardcore friends) have run the SLC Python Meetup . We started the meetup because we were too lazy to drive to the other Python meetup – 20+ miles away – during rush hour. From 2014 to now, we’re close to 2500 members. … [Read more…]

The Bait and Switch of Data Science

Every morning, I read almost a dozen articles. A few articles usually relate to data science (I hate the term “data science”, as it’s very overloaded. Here, I’ll confine data science to AI or machine learning). Lately, I notice more and more articles echoing something I’ve been saying for years – data science is hard, … [Read more…]

2019 – New Year, New Habits

It’s the day after Christmas, and I’m sitting in my grandma’s house in Omaha. She’s a cute 88 year old lady who always inspires me to be a better version of myself. She never complains, and simply continues to take care of herself and focus on what she can change for the better. We’ve never … [Read more…]