For the last year or so, I've been somewhat obsessed with habit formation. It started as a personal journey to be more productive and was amplified after reading Atomic Habits by James Clear. This year, instead of setting brand new goals, I've taken a look at my habits over the past year and looked for … Continue reading Lessons from a year of experimenting with habits
Leading vs. lagging indicators in business and in life
"If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it," is common business wisdom. It is especially important advice for startups searching for product/market fit via the build-measure-learn feedback loop, a major part of the Lean Startup ethos. Build something. Measure its effect. Learn what worked, what didn't. Repeat. The ability to execute this loop quickly … Continue reading Leading vs. lagging indicators in business and in life
Deploying your ML model with Flask and Heroku
I gave a tutorial to the SharpestMinds community this week on Flask and Heroku that proved useful. So I edited it and uploaded it. I essentially live code a basic web app from scratch to host an image classifier. It is scrappy and cuts a few corners, but the result is a working MVP. I … Continue reading Deploying your ML model with Flask and Heroku
The broken windows theory, and why you should clean your room
There is a concept in criminology known as broken windows theory. It says that crime in a community can be significantly reduced by reducing signs of disorder (like broken windows) and policing minor but visible crimes like vandalism. The theory rests on the assumption that an area's environment has a big influence on the behavior … Continue reading The broken windows theory, and why you should clean your room
Why it’s so hard to estimate the time to build software
Estimating the time for software projects is notoriously difficult. This is because the majority of the work in most software projects is "discovered" work. Work that was not obvious while planning that is discovered when implementing. If you've done any serious programming work, you'll know what I'm talking about. "Turns out this 3rd party API … Continue reading Why it’s so hard to estimate the time to build software
Designing at the right level of abstraction
As SharpestMinds matures as a company, good design is becoming increasingly important. For most of the company's lifetime, we embraced a design-on-the-fly, just-make-it-work attitude. Without much more than a text or verbal description, we would simultaneously plan, implement, and design new features for our web-app. This approach worked well enough while we iterated towards product/market … Continue reading Designing at the right level of abstraction
When to scrap the codebase and start from scratch
This is one of those decisions that is so context specific that almost all advice on it is worthless. Nevertheless, I thought I'd share the story of when I had to make this decision as a beginner programmer. There may be a lesson or two. In the summer of 2018, SharpestMinds was a platform for … Continue reading When to scrap the codebase and start from scratch