Just updated the blog with some fascinating reads! Dive into an introductory course on deep reinforcement learning and discover how a single newsletter catapulted a media brand to $15m in revenue. Savor a delectable Szechuan pork and eggplant stir-fry recipe, and explore the cutting-edge concept of machine unlearning. Ever considered woodworking as a break from tech’s absurdity? There’s something on that too. Plus, reflections on the web’s potential, the intricate craft of web development, the philosophical parallels between software and military strategy, and an inspiring journey from junior to senior engineer. Check them all out!

• Deep Reinforcement Learning: Zero to Hero: This is a short and practical introductory course on foundational and classic deep reinforcement learning algorithms. By the end of the course, you will have written from scratch algorithms like DQN, SAC, PPO, as well as understood at a high-level the theory behind them.
• The media brand with one email newsletter, 15 staff and $15m revenue: 1440 may be the biggest media brand you’ve never heard of. It has an email list of 3.5m and is growing at a rate of 250,000 readers a month.
• Video: Szechuan pork and eggplant stir fry is crunchy, saucy, and has a perfect balance of flavors. Easy and delicious any day of the week!
• Machine Unlearning in 2024: As our ML models today become larger and their (pre-)training sets grow to inscrutable sizes, people are increasingly interested in the concept of machine unlearning to edit away undesired things like private data, stale knowledge, copyrighted materials, toxic/unsafe content, dangerous capabilities, and misinformation, without retraining models from scratch.
• Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software: If you had the choice to sculpt a leg chair out of wood or write a full-fledged audio engine, complete with kernel drivers and whatnot, inside an app for controlling monitor brightness, what wou… Wait, no, that’s not a question, you would do the leg chair for sure. There’s no way that other thing makes sense.
• We can have a different web: Many yearn for the “good old days” of the web. We could have those good old days back — or something even better — and if anything, it would be easier now than it ever was.
• Motorcycles, Cars, Websites, and Seams: Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.
• Software Friction: In his book On War, Clausewitz defines friction as the difference between military theory and reality: Thus, then, in strategy everything is very simple, but not on that account very easy. Everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult. These difficulties accumulate and produce a friction, which no man can imagine exactly who has not seen war. As an instance of [friction], take the weather.
• My Mentee Went From Junior -> Senior Engineer in less than 2 years. Here’s how.: An actionable plan for promotion no matter your level