When I read science fiction, I prefer to read hard science fiction. Where authors aspire to be accurate with their depiction of reality. The laws of physics are not broken. Energy is conserved. Technology is not just magic with another name. There’s nothing I love more than a science fiction book with good science. The […]
The good news is that it’s easy to be vegetarian these days. When people ask me what it was like to stop eating meat, I can honestly reply that my diet hasn’t changed very much. I still enjoy burgers, bolognese sauce, chicken wraps, and many of my favourite meat dishes thanks to a growing selection of imitation meat.
This is part two in a series of posts trying to answer the question, “Should Billionaires exist?“ Part 1: Why focus on billionaires? In a speech in 2013, Obama referred to inequality as the defining challenge of our time – claiming it as the reason he ran for president. More recently, the Covid-19 pandemic has […]
Part 1: Why focus on billionaires? Note: I am not an economist. I am not even sure what my views are on the subject, but I’m sure my biases will come across. If you have any disagreements or points to make, please leave a comment and I’ll use it to inform my thinking :). Though […]
I’m a self-taught programmer* and the CTO at SharpestMinds, where we have very small team (we just recently went from N=3 to N=4) and our engineering and development team consists of mostly just me. After leaving my PhD in Physics, I’ve learnt to code almost exclusively by building. Inevitably, I’ve had to refactor a lot […]
I sat down with Jeremie Harris recently (co-founder and COO of SharpestMinds) for the Towards Data Science podcast. We talked about quitting a PhD, learning programming and data science from scratch, and what habits can help you get there. Listen below on Spotify, or find it on your favourite podcast streaming service!
From experience, I know how easy it can be to over-engineer a feature nobody actually wants, or succumb to the sunk-cost fallacy and continue down the wrong product path for too long. To counteract these mistakes, you need to build a habit of constantly questioning your decisions – of keeping the bigger picture in mind. […]
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 […]
“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 […]
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 […]
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