Throughout my life, I’ve had some incredible mentors – iconoclasts and geniuses, rich and poor, all of whom took their time to teach me valuable lessons. I’m not sure what any of them saw in me at the time, but they all shaped who I am today. I am extremely grateful for their lessons. Yesterday … [Read more…]
Tomorrow is 2018. Many people will set New Year’s resolutions. Depending on the type of resolution, 80% of those with New Year’s resolutions will fail by mid-February. Most people fail because they don’t want to put in the hard work. It’s easier to coast along for the year. Then New Year’s rolls around, resolutions are made … [Read more…]
One of my recent pastimes is reading Amazon’s annual reports (because, who doesn’t like to do that at night?). One thing that’s struck me is that Bezos is this century’s Warren Buffett. He takes an extremely long view of things with a 21st century view and sticks to the basics – build a moat around … [Read more…]
Non-Tech Motel Living and Slowly Dying. (LA Review Of Books) Coal Declining Due to Economics, Not Regulation. Natural gas up. Coal down. (Ritholz) Chamath Palihapitiya, Founder and CEO Social Capital, on Money as an Instrument of Change. I really enjoyed this talk with Chamath. He’s got a viewpoint and action-oriented mindset that really resonates with … [Read more…]
“AWS cloud is a fad”. At least that’s the gist of what I heard when a friend told me about somebody leaving a company due to a critical initiative to move IT and data resources to the cloud. The cloud happens to be on AWS. I sat there stunned for a moment, mostly because I … [Read more…]
On Wednesday, 12/6/2017, I gave a talk at SLC Python to a standing room only audience. This was a record setting attendance for the SLC Python meetup. Apparently time series forecasting is a popular topic 😉 Here are the materials from my talk, posted on GitHub.
A friend I were chatting this afternoon about the impact on the role of data scientists from automated machine learning/AI products like AWS’s new Sagemaker. There is a real possibility that much of the current work that business-oriented data scientists do – model tuning, optimization, and deployment – will be automated. What’s a data scientist … [Read more…]
Non-Tech It’s the Grim Reality of Frequent Work Travel: Health Problems. Travel is glamorous, except it also sucks when done in excess. My recent trip to Asia reaffirmed this. Sitting in a plane and eating airport food? Gross. And if this is part of your job? It’s about as awesome as being a long-haul truck … [Read more…]
If you’re in the SLC area, please attend my talk, “Intro to Time Series Forecasting”. It will involve some brief overviews of time series analysis and forecasting basics, then delve into how to use Facebook’s new time series forecasting library, Prophet. Very practical advice along the way, mostly from a business viewpoint (I speak to … [Read more…]
Jet lagged like crazy right now, so no new weekend reads. Next week, I’ll have an article or two. Have a fun weekend!