Public technical talks and slides

Over the years, I’ve put together a few public technical talks where the slides are accessible on this site. These are only really nice to view on desktop, and require the use of arrow keys to move around. Long-form notes are also available — generated by a sweet Sphinx and reStructuredText plugin. I figured I’d link to them all here so I don’t lose track:

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Software planning for skeptics

Engineers hate estimating things.

One of the most-often quoted lines about estimation is “Hofstadter’s Law”, which goes:

Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

If you want to deliver inaccurate information to your team on a regular basis, give them a 3-month-out product development timeline every week. This is a truism at every company at which I have worked over a varied career in software.

So, estimation is inaccurate. Now what?

Why do we need a product delivery schedule if it’s always wrong?

There is an answer to this question, too:

Realistic schedules are the key to creating good software. It forces you to do the best features first and allows you to make the right decisions about what to build. [Good schedules] make your product better, delight your customers, and — best of all — let you go home at five o’clock every day.

This quote comes from Joel Spolsky.

So, planning and estimation isn’t so much about accuracy, it’s about constraints.

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Lenovo and the new Linux desktop experience

I am a longtime Thinkpad and Lenovo user as my preferred laptop for Linux computing and programming.


The Lenovo X1C 2016 4th Generation Model is my latest Linux laptop

For some context, I’ve been running Linux on my desktop and laptop machines since ~2001, and started using Thinkpads in this role starting with the famous Thinkpad T40 (2003), one of the first laptops that provided good Linux support, a rugged design, portability, power, and an excellent keyboard.

I then moved through a few different Lenovo models: the T400 (2008), the T420s (2011), and the X220 (2011).

I spent a couple of short stints in-between — which I always regretted — on other PC laptop models, including HP and Asus. I upgraded from the T420s to the X220 after coming to the realization that portability and power consumption mattered more to me than the 14″ form factor, and that I could easily expand the X220’s limited hard drive with a 512 GiB SSD.

Since 2013 or so, the X220 has been my main programming/Linux machine. The X220 was my favorite Thinkpad model of all time, despite some flaws. I’ll discuss my Linux desktop experience with the X220 briefly, and then go on to my experience with my current model, the Lenovo X1 Carbon 2016 model (4th Generation).

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Charlottesville tech: a community that won’t be stopped by tragedy

Note: This post was written on August 17, 2017. I was living in Charlottesville, Virginia at the time; I had been based there since 2011 and would end up living there until 2019. Unfortunately, 5 days before this post was written, a tragedy happened in my town. This was my attempt to provide an alternative perspective on Charlottesville, the town, when this specific (terrible) tragedy on a specific (terrible) day became all anyone knew about it in the national headlines for months and years on end.

tl;dr — This New York techie moved to Charlottesville six years ago and witnessed a vibrant tech ecosystem develop. Though Charlottesville has some deep social problems, it’s also a place of creativity and optimism. Its best communities will prevail.

After spending my childhood, teenage years, college years, and early working years in and around New York City, in 2011, I was ready for a change. My wife was applying to medical schools across the country, and I was in the early stages of running my tech startup as a fully remote/distributed team.

Charlottesville’s pedestrian Downtown Mall on a calm fall day in 2013.

Charlottesville’s pedestrian “Downtown Mall” on a calm fall day in 2013. (source)

I think prior to the tragic events of Saturday, August 12, most life-long New Yorkers I know rarely gave much thought to Charlottesville, Virginia. Maybe they would hear the occasional news story about it, or had a friend, or friend of a friend, who attended the University of Virginia. But, for the most part, the locale occupied very little room in their brain — perhaps none — as was the case for me in 2011.
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Specialists in medicine: not the problem

The NYTimes published a woefully misguided piece on the “specialist stranglehold” on modern US medicine.

So, doctors are to blame for setting the prices for reimbursement by private health insurance companies? And they are also to blame for pursuing extra years of low-pay resident/fellowship training so that they can do advanced procedures and be paid decently for their work? And, they are also to blame for “defending their turf” within a specialty — that is, for specializing at all?

And, this article is even written by a doctor?! Why, yes, of course, it is!

I think medicine may be the world’s most self-hating profession. Trapped inside a system that takes advantage of their altruism, ridiculous work ethic, and decades of training, they can’t help but blame themselves even as the capitalists around them exploit them.

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The Great Reckoning in Digital Attention

Note: At the time of this post’s publication, I was the founder/CTO of Parse.ly, a company that worked closely with major media companies on a real-time analytics platform.

The attention economy is broken.

Brands are spending billions of dollars on a complex digital ad ecosystem to influence consumers, but with often terrible results. Publishers, meanwhile, have never had bigger digital audiences — but they only earn a fraction of the revenue, mainly due to the power of the Google/Facebook adtech dominance.

Spending on Google and Facebook

Spending on Google and Facebook ads exploded between 2010 and 2016, as shown by the orange areas above. Google and Facebook also have about half of all the advertising revenue in the Internet category. It’s very likely that by 2020, that will be closer to 60–70%, with every other Internet publisher on the planet fighting for a shrinking portion of ad dollars.

Consumers — you and me — are the ones footing the bill. We see increasingly slow page load times for publisher pages which are bloated with ad tech vendor code; increasingly invasive ads from brands who are desperate to catch a click; and, a media trend toward outrage, rather than thoughtful debate.

NYC city street

On this last point: it is outrage, not truth, that prevails in an Internet economy built around attention capture and auction, which is how our programmatic digital advertising ecosystem works.

This is because outrage — through a quirk of societal and brain evolution — is more effective at capturing our time. Indeed, as we’ve been learning, outrage decoupled from truth is one of the most engaging forms of content on the web.
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In support of net neutrality

I wrote a letter in support of net neutrality and Title II classification of Internet Service Providers to the FCC. For background on this FCC vote, you can read this Arstechnica explainer.

You can add your own comment in support of net neutrality to the FCC at the URL gofccyourself.org. To clarify some terms:

  • “net neutrality” is a term coined by Tim Wu (author of “The Master Switch” and “The Attention Merchants”) which describes a legal principle that “Internet service providers and governments regulating the Internet should treat all data on the Internet the same, not discriminating or charging differentially by user, content, website, platform, application, type of attached equipment, or mode of communication.”
  • “title II” is a part of the Communications Act of 1934 that establishes that certain forms of communication infrastructure are “common carriers”, which means that in delivering Internet service, the ISPs “cannot discriminate [content/services], that is refuse the service unless there is some compelling reason.”

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Parse.ly Culture: Ethics & Identity

In September 2013, my startup, Parse.ly, had just raised Series A capital, and had just begun growing its team rapidly, from a small group of fewer than 10 to over 40 employees now. In the past several years, I have run Parse.ly’s fully remote engineering, product & design team.

Back in 2013, we had achieved initial product/market fit, initial revenue, and had already established a kernel of a product and engineering culture. I knew the company would change, but I wasn’t sure exactly how. Meanwhile, I had just recently read “Reasons & Persons”, a book on ethics and identity by the philosopher Derek Parfit. Though his ideas focused primarily on individuals, they influenced the way I thought about my business, my team, and its evolution over time.

What follows are my speaker notes from a talk I gave to my team to discuss the issues of Ethics and Identity central to Parse.ly’s culture:

Origin of this talk

  • Parse.ly turned 4 years old in May 2013
  • I reflected after our Series A round
  • I read a book about ethics/identity, Reasons & Persons
  • Realized some interesting concepts apply to firms, too

Parse.ly, different takes

  • “An analytics platform for large media companies?”
  • “A startup founded originally in 2009 at Dreamit Ventures?”
  • “A team of employees?”
  • “A specific configuration of tech and code?”

What is Parse.ly, really?

Are we:

  • our history?
  • our appearance to customers / press?
  • our employees (or founders)?
  • our technology / product?
  • our shareholders? (huh?)

Ship of Theseus

What is the Ship of Theseus?

  • They took away the old planks as they decayed
  • … putting in new and stronger timber in their place
  • One side held that the ship remained the same,
  • … and the other contended that it was not the same.

(Discussion.)

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The Internet is a cult generator

Noam Chomsky once gave a great answer on what he sees as the “purpose of education.” I hand-transcribed this quote because it was so good:


“Technology is basically neutral. It’s kind of like a hammer. The hammer doesn’t care whether you use it to build a house, or a torturer uses it to crush somebody’s skull. The hammer can do either.

The Internet is extremely valuable if you know what you’re looking for. I use it all the time for research, as everyone does.

If you know what you’re looking for — if you have a framework of understanding which directs you to particular things, and sidelines lots of others — then this can be a valuable tool. Of course, you always have to ask yourself, ‘Is my framework the right one?’ Perhaps you need to modify it from time to time.

But you can’t pursue any kind of inquiry without a relatively clear framework that’s directing your search and helping you choose what’s significant and what isn’t; what can be put aside; what is going to be pursued; what ought to be challenged; what should be further developed; and so on.

You can’t expect somebody to become a biologist or a doctor by giving the person access to the Harvard University biology library, and just say, ‘Look through it, you’re on your own.’ The Internet is the same, but just magnified enormously.

If you don’t understand or know what you’re looking for — if you don’t have some conception of what matters — then you’re lost. And you should always be willing to question your framework and make sure you’re not going in the wrong direction.

But if you don’t have that, exploring the Internet is just picking out random factoids that don’t mean anything.

Behind any significant use of contemporary technology is some well-constructed directive apparatus. It is very unlikely to be helpful — it is very likely, in fact, to be harmful.

It turns out, for example, that a random exploration through the Internet turns out to be a cult generator. Pick up a ‘fact’ here, another ‘fact’ there, and someone else reinforces it, and all of a sudden you have some crazed picture that has some ‘factual’ basis, but nothing to do with the world.”

–Noam Chomsky, transcribed from this YouTube video


This is why I am personally so careful about my internet media diet, which has been a topic of reflection on this blog going back to its creation in the 2000s. Stay healthily skeptical!

The Twitter growth conundrum

Note from the future: this post written in November 2016. A lot has happened to Twitter (or, Twitter/X) since then. But, the fundamental analysis of Twitter’s growth dynamics outlined in this post continues to hold true even 8+ years later.

Twitter is the public Internet company everyone loves to hate these days. It’s not growing. No one wants to buy it. And people are genuinely confused: what, exactly, is Twitter? Is it a social network? A “micro-blogging” platform? A “live events destination”? A social data company?

Twitter 2011–2015 user growth.

I am one of Twitter’s active users, tweeting on topics such as analytics, Python programming, and the media industry, in which I work. In my day-to-day dealings with journalists, editors, social media managers, audience development folks, and others in the media industry, it’s clear Twitter has a special position among the professional class of media raconteurs.
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