Author: laptopheaven

Daily Links: Monday, Apr 8th, 2024

In today’s blog post, I’m diving deep into the insights that have shaped my approach to business and digital transformation, drawing from my extensive experience at Microsoft. I’ll also share a gem about crafting constructive feedback in code reviews – a must-read for any tech leader aiming to foster growth and improvement in their team. Join me on this journey to better business agility and becoming the ultimate CEO whisperer.

Daily Links: Sunday, Apr 7th, 2024

In my latest exploration of diverse topics, from drilling down on the intricacies of statistical power with the Delta Method in A/B testing, converting Ryobi batteries for kids’ ride-on cars, to unveiling the top product roadmap tools of 2024, there’s a wealth of knowledge to delve into. Plus, a unique dive into de-bogging oneself and a compelling case for schedule-syncing over micromanaging. Dive in with me into these fascinating discussions!

  • Calculating Statistical Power When Your Analysis Requires the Delta Method: In this post, we explore a situation typical of a website, where a user is allowed to view the page multiple times and may click on a button of interest on any visit. We would like to perform an A/B test on the non-user level metric, the click-through rate (CTR), defined via $\text{total clicks}/\text{total page views}$. In order to do the final analysis, we would need to estimate the variance for the variable via the delta method. However, what does that mean for a priori statistical power calculations?
  • PowerJeep: A Ryobi Battery Conversion for Ride on Cars
  • Product Roadmap Tools: The Top 5 in 2024: Looking into product roadmap tools? In this blog, we take an in-depth look at the top 5 roadmapping tools of 2024 and what to look for.
  • So you wanna de-bog yourself: What I found in the mire
  • Why Micromanage When You Can Schedule-Sync?: For managers and employees who want to get on the same page, there is a far superior alternative to micromanaging. It’s called schedule-syncing.

Daily Links: Saturday, Apr 6th, 2024

In this week’s eclectic roundup, we delve into the art of showing appreciation at work, uncover the secrets behind HubSpot’s $30B success story, and sniff out the latest research on the science of smell. Also on the agenda: exploring Pinterest’s innovative Text-to-SQL project, highlighting the dark world of HTML email security, dissecting credit card rewards programs, and much more. Whether you’re a tech aficionado, a future-focused professional, or simply curious, there’s something here for everyone. Join me as we navigate through fascinating insights and discoveries from various corners of the digital world!

  • Simple Ways to Show Appreciation at Work: Appreciation, like trust, is relationship-based — each interaction we have with someone either strengthens or weakens that invisible connection. The more we feel appreciated, the stronger those bonds become, and the more tension they can withstand when something challenges it. Consequently, knowing how to build and maintain relationships where people feel appreciated is a foundational skill — one that’s important to learn from the very early stages of your career. Appreciate people’s presence: People need to know that others care that they are there. Letting someone know their presence alone is having an impact on you or the organization can make a big difference. Notice when people are missing at work and reach out to make sure they are doing fine. Even if it is people’s job to be there, thank them for coming. Appreciate their ideas and contribution. Managers and individual contributors alike need to show colleagues that their input is welcome and celebrated. Honor people’s ideas and expertise by talking them up in senior leader meetings. When people share input or feedback on a project, whether you like their idea or not, actively listen. Appreciate people’s lives outside of work. Our jobs should help us live our best lives, not take them over. For people to feel appreciated, they need to know that we understand their passions, priorities, and responsibilities outside of work. They need leaders who respect boundaries and role model self-care, and coworkers who nurture a culture of support. Appreciate people’s need for growth and development. While many people think development is about promotions and attending trainings, it is also about being around people who challenge us — managers that take time to understand and support our career goals, and coworkers who help us learn and grow. If you don’t already know the career goals and aspirations of your direct reports, take time to understand them. Ask your coworkers for feedback and tips on how you can improve and invite them to do the same with you.
  • Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO): Dharmesh Shah is the co-founder and CTO of HubSpot (currently valued at $30 billion) and one of the most fascinating founders I’ve ever met. Dharmesh is the keeper of HubSpot’s Culture Code, built ChatSpot (an AI chatbot built on top of HubSpot CRM) and a game called WordPlay (which grew to 16 million users), and also founded and writes for OnStartups, a top-ranking startup blog and community with more than 1M members. He’s also invested in 100+ startups including OpenAI, AngelList, Coinbase, and Dropbox.
  • The science of smell is fragrant with submolecules: A chemical that we smell may be a composite of multiple smell-making pieces.
  • How we built Text-to-SQL at Pinterest: Adam Obeng | Data Scientist, Data Platform Science; J.C. Zhong | Tech Lead, Analytics Platform; Charlie Gu | Sr. Manager, Engineering Writing queries to solve analytical problems is the core task for…
  • Kobold letters: Anyone who has had to deal with HTML emails on a technical level has probably reached the point where they wanted to quit their job or just set fire to all the mail clients due to their inconsistent implementations. But HTML emails are not just a source of frustration, they can also be a serious security risk.
  • Anatomy of a credit card rewards program: Credit card rewards are mostly funded out of interchange, a fee paid by businesses to accept cards.
  • JetMoE:
  • The Design Philosophy of Great Tables:
  • The hardest part of building software is not coding, it’s requirements:
  • Building LLMs for Code Repair: Introduction At Replit, we are rethinking the developer experience with AI as a first-class citizen of the development environment. Towards this vision, we are tightly integrating AI tools with our IDE. Currently, LLMs specialized for programming are trained with a mixture of source code and relevant natural languages, such as GitHub issues and StackExchange posts. These models are not trained to interact directly with the development environment and, therefore, have limited ability to understand events or use tools within Replit. We believe that by training models native to Replit, we can create more powerful AI tools for developers. A simple example of a Replit-native model takes a session event as input and returns a well-defined response. We set out to identify a scenario where we could develop a model that could also become a useful tool for our current developers and settled on code repair. Developers spend a significant fraction of their time fixing bugs in software. In 2018, when Microsoft released “A Common Protocol for Languages,” Replit began supporting the Language Server Protocol. Since then, the LSP has helped millions using Replit to find errors in their code. This puts LSP diagnostics among our most common events, with hundreds of millions per day. However, while the LSP identifies errors, it can only provide fixes in limited cases. In fact, only 10% of LSP diagnostic messages in Python projects on Replit have associated fixes. Given the abundance of training data, repairing code errors using LSP diagnostics is therefore the ideal setting to build our first Replit-native AI model. Methodology Data
  • A little guide to building Large Language Models in 2024: A little guide through all you need to know to train a good performance large language model in 2024.
    This is an introduction talk with link to references for further reading.
  • MVC vs MVP Architecture: What’s the Difference?: Are you a Product Manager looking to navigate the complex landscape of software development with confidence and creativity? The choice of architectural patterns — Model-View-Controller (MVC) and…
  • Biases in Expected Goals Models Confound Finishing Ability: The assessment of finishing skill in soccer using xG remains contentious due to players’ difficulty in consistently outperforming their cumulative xG. We attempt to pin down the limitations and nuances and borrow techniques from AI fairness to address them.
  • Where Graph Theory Meets The Road: The Algorithms Behind Route Planning: Back in the hazy olden days of the pre-2000s, navigating between two locations generally required someone to whip out a paper map and painstakingly figure out the most optimal route between those d…
  • Death is a Feature: When Parisians got tired of cemeteries during the French Revolution, they conscripted priests to relocate bones of more than six million deceased forebears to empty limestone quarries below the cit…
  • Just for Fun: A Five-Card Poker Library Using C#: Chances are if you’ve had many coding interviews you’ve been presented with a poker problem. Here’s a great take from Dr. James McCaffrey of Microsoft Research.
  • Where Did My Traffic Go? Hint: It Wasn’t an Algorithm Update:

Daily Links: Friday, Apr 5th, 2024

Hey, blog readers! Just dropped some rich pieces you might find intriguing. From celebrating the launch of Redict 7.3.0, a stable version that’s shaking up the Redis® OSS community, to uncovering the chilling use of AI by the Israeli army in Gaza. There’s a deep dive into accelerating local LLM inference on Intel platforms, and some investigative tips on unravelling the mystery of shell companies’ true owners. Fancy using AI to plan your next trip or achieve better sleep with a portable blackout curtain? There’s something on that too. Plus, a must-read for newsletter publishers on setting up SPF and DKIM. Dive in for these curated gems!

  • Redict 7.3.0 is now available: The Redict community is pleased to announce the release of Redict 7.3.0, the first stable version of our copyleft fork of Redis® OSS 7.2.4.1 You can download the release on Codeberg, or download one of our official container images from registry.redict.io. We have written comprehensive documentation detailing our compatibility with Redis® OSS 7.2.4, which also provides detailed documentation for various migration scenarios, such as for users of the official Redis® containers on Docker Hub, downstream package maintainers, and so on.
  • ‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza: The Israeli army has marked tens of thousands of Gazans as suspects for assassination, using an AI targeting system with little human oversight and a permissive policy for casualties, +972 and Local Call reveal.
  • ipex-llm: Accelerate local LLM inference and finetuning (LLaMA, Mistral, ChatGLM, Qwen, Baichuan, Mixtral, Gemma, etc.) on Intel CPU and GPU (e.g., local PC with iGPU, discrete GPU such as Arc, Flex and Max). A PyTorch LLM library that seamlessly integrates with llama.cpp, HuggingFace, LangChain, LlamaIndex, DeepSpeed, vLLM, FastChat, ModelScope, etc.
  • Tips for Linking Shell Companies to their Secret Owners: At a recent panel at the 2024 NICAR conference, Karrie Kehoe, deputy head of data and research at ICIJ, offered a series of tips for investigating the true owners of shell companies.
  • How I use AI to plan a trip✈️: A step-by-step guide to using Google Gemini as a free travel agent, exploring how the AI tool benefits from access to Google Flights and Google Hotels
  • Sleepout® Portable Blackout Curtain 2.0: The patented, portable blackout curtain that completely darkens a room and installs anywhere for better sleep. Greenguard® and OEKO-TEX® certified free from harmful chemicals and substances. Each Sleepout® Curtain comes with a carry bag and 2x industrial-grade locking suction cups.
  • Why SPF and DKIM Matter — And How to Set Them Up For Your Newsletter: At the heart of authentication are two tools that every email sender should be using: SPF and DKIM. Let’s help you set things up.

Daily Links: Thursday, Apr 4th, 2024

This week on the blog, we dive into a variety of intriguing topics—cooking up projects with AI in Mr. Maeda’s Cozy Kitchen, getting a crash course on responsive images for ASP.NET Core developers, and exploring the integration of GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio. We also dig into the distinctive qualities of GenZ software engineers, offer a visual intro to transformers and their importance in deep learning, and ponder why your latest project might not be getting the sign-ups it deserves. Plus, we review the thought-provoking read “Tidy First?”, groove to Lo-fi Succession beats, and discuss bringing Python to Cloudflare workers using Pyodide and WebAssembly. Join us as we build, learn, and innovate together!

Daily Links: Wednesday, Apr 3rd, 2024

This week, I’ve dived into everything from the essentials of logo terminology to the early design insights of Spotify. I’ve explored the core product design principles that balance innovation with user behavior, examined how data shapes the financial services landscape, and even looked at the strategic shift from “Product First” to “Product Last”. Plus, don’t miss the discussion on Kim Mulkey’s reaction to a critical profile – it’s quite the read!

Daily Links: Tuesday, Apr 2nd, 2024

This week on the blog, I’m diving into a treasure trove of insights, from dissecting the art of distinguishing valuable signals amidst the noise to exploring the existential musings triggered by a closer look at Westworld’s robotic allure. I also touch on the intriguing revelations about the XZ Backdoor, ponder on why some clothes shrink post-wash, and share nuggets of wisdom for engineers seeking to deepen their technical expertise. Plus, an imaginative take on economics through the lens of food awaits, alongside a critical perspective on propaganda and the unexpected pitfalls of after-hours work on productivity. Don’t miss the exciting discussion on how micro-breaks can revolutionize your workday, and a behind-the-scenes look at the FBI’s unparalleled sting operation. Join me as I navigate through these diverse topics, aiming to enlighten and inspire.

Daily Links: Saturday, Mar 30th, 2024

This week on the blog, I’m diving into a treasure trove of insights, from spring cleaning your projects with April planning tips to exploring the competitive edge in the publishing world and the tech industry’s future. Discover the power of niches with Kritasha Gupta and what news publishers must do to avoid extinction. Plus, join me in geeking out over the latest tech gadgets like the Logitech MX Master 3S and the Keychron Q0 Plus. Don’t miss the compelling stories of a cybersecurity icon and practical advice for personal and professional growth. There’s something for everyone passionate about staying ahead in our fast-evolving world!

  • April 2024 Planning Tips: Time for Spring Cleaning: What are some ways you might clear out the project clutter?
  • Old-school: “What’s your competitive advantage as a publishing business? It’s not the ability to churn out more articles than anybody else,” says Ian Betteridge.
  • The FT’s Kritasha Gupta: The power of niches, newsletters and audiences: The media face so many challenges that it is hard to focus on just one problem, Kritasha Gupta, head of business development at the Financial Times, tells
  • What news publishers should do now to avoid extinction in 2025: Matthew Scott Goldstein’s follow-up to the piece that inspired a New Yorker article.
  • Building an email to calendar LLM: Talk is cheap, show me the code Introduction A common problem my friends and I have is receiving actionable emails whose priorities are medium level. They do require action of some sort ($ \geq lowest\ priority$), but the action is due in the near future ($\leq highest\ priority$). I tend to skim over these emails, get a gist of what is required of me, mark them as unread and promise to get back to them later.
  • Meet the Mad Scientist Who Wrote the Book on How to Hunt Hackers: Thirty years ago, Cliff Stoll published The Cuckoo’s Egg, a book about his cat-and-mouse game with a KGB-sponsored hacker. Today, the internet is a far darker place—and Stoll has become a cybersecurity icon.
  • Logitech MX Master 3S: #promo Wireless Performance Mouse with Ultra-Fast Scrolling, Ergo, 8K DPI, Track on Glass, Quiet Clicks, USB-C, Bluetooth, Windows, Linux, Chrome (Black)
  • Keychron Q0 Plus QMK Custom Number Pad: Keychron Q0 Plus is a custom number pad with a macro column and rotary encoder knob on the left, serving as a separate numeric keypad or a vast customizable array of keysets with QMK/VIA support. It’s added a new double-gasket design with an all-metal CNC machined body, screw-in stabs, hot-swappable function, etc.
  • Setting Clearer Expectations: The Compass vs. Map Method: They may end up in Switzerland, Lichtenstein, or Austria. They might also keep travelling and end up in Germany, or somewhere in the Arctic Circle. The compass method is just a direction, without a lot of constraints.
  • Advice That I Can’t Get Out of My Head: If you want to spend years in high growth environments, and reap the benefits that that growth entails, it’s essential to make sure that you are learning at least as quickly as your role is growing if you want to keep your job. You can get a coach, find mentors, take classes, read, listen to podcasts, or pursue any number of other different ways to learn – the right learning strategy is the one that you’ll actually follow through on. The path that I’ve invested in the most was reading, particularly reading as much as I could about business and scaling high growth tech companies.

Daily Links: Friday, Mar 29th, 2024

In this week’s roundup, we dive into how Hearst Newspapers is using AI to enhance local news, dispel myths surrounding digital wallets, and examine the health impacts of poor sleep. We also explore cutting-edge tools for understanding complex issues, improving software requirements, and a deep dive into the consequences of Turing-completeness. Plus, there are insights into the architecture of basic LLM applications, creative strategies for managing tech debt, and the intersection of music and AI with Hybrid-Net. There’s something for everyone, from the tech-savvy to the book lovers and those intrigued by secure voting systems. Join me on this intellectual journey across various fields!

  • Hearst Newspapers leverages AI to build local content, reader loyalty: Tim O’Rourke, vice president/content strategy for Hearst Newspapers, leads the company’s DevHub, which helps provide high-quality interactive local content typically only found in much larger publications. He shared the strategy behind the technology with INMA members.
  • Digital wallets and the “only Apple Pay does this” mythology: Apple Pay is great, but I think there is some misunderstanding out there about the details of how it works.
  • Two nights of broken sleep can make people feel years older, finds study: Beyond simply feeling decrepit, perception of being older can affect health by encouraging unhealthy eating and reducing exercise
  • Rootclaim. Calculating reality.: Rootclaim helps people understand complex issues by combining the power of crowdsourced information with the mathematical validity of statistics.
  • Better Software Requirements:
  • Core Delegation Playbooks for Executive Assistants: Actionable playbooks and standard operating procedures for email inbox management, calendar management, and more
  • These 50 companies have donated over $23 million to election deniers since January 6, 2021: Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. Then, according to the report of the bipartisan January 6 Commission, Trump engaged in a “multi-part conspiracy to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 Presidential election.” Trump did not do this alone. He was supported by members of Congress who endorsed his lies and voted against certifying the election results, state attorneys general who filed briefs in support of Trump’s baseless legal claims, and local officials who helped Trump create slates of fake electors. This all culminated in the violence of January 6, 2021, by a mob that was incited and encouraged by Trump, both before and during the attack.
  • What Computers Cannot Do: The Consequences of Turing-Completeness: I have found a lot of programmers that do not understand the Halting Problem and its implications, so here is my attempt to fix that.
  • BooksByMood: Find books to read based on your mood (e.g., what to read when I’m tired). Suggested books have an average rating of 4.09/5 on Goodreads.
  • How to Get Tech-Debt on the Roadmap: At QCon San Francisco 2023, Ben Hartshorne talked about integrating technical debt resolutions into a roadmap. It is essential to articulate tech-debt value beyond just calling them technical fixes.
  • Programmatic Html to PDF Generation using the WebView2 Control: In this post I describe how to use the Microsoft WebView2 control to automate HTML to PDF generation generically for any kind of Windows application, including services. We’ll look at the WebView and it’s printing functionality and some of the intricacies that are involved in hosting the WebView control outside of a desktop application context to provide unattended mode even in service context.
  • The Current Architecture of a Basic LLM Application: A few years ago, artificial intelligence was a specialized topic for a small set of tech companies with deep expertise and even deeper pockets. Fast forward to today, and it’s hard to find a tech…
  • How Hearst Magazines is using its digital membership model to grow its e-commerce marketplace business: Hearst’s Sheel Shah took the stage at the Digiday Publishing Summit to speak about why its marketplace business is focusing on authority.
  • Hybrid-Net: Real-time audio source separation, generate lyrics, chords, beat.

    A transformer-based hybrid multimodal model, various transformer models address different problems in the field of music information retrieval, these models generate corresponding information dependencies that mutually influence each other.

    An AI-powered multimodal project focused on music, generate chords, beats, lyrics, melody, and tabs for any song.

  • What is CodeCanvas?: A new tool that blends your everyday work apps into one. It’s the all-in-one workspace for you and your team
  • Standardise, Simplify, Automate – In That Order!: If we want to succeed with an automation project, it is important that we do the right steps in the right order. Let’s explore why.
  • The Power of Creative Constraints in Scrum: How to enhance creativity and boost innovation by embracing Scrum framework constraints.
  • On Secure Voting Systems: we believe that the hallmarks of a reliable and optimal election process are hand-marked paper ballots, which are optically scanned, separately and securely stored, and rigorously audited after the election but before certification.
  • Building a modern specialist consumer media business: The latest publishing news, jobs, analysis, comment, interviews and in-depth features about UK newspaper, magazine and online publishers.
  • Knowledge Series #29: How does the release process work?: Pipelines, builds, Jenkins, Docker, continuous integration and more explained
  • Unlocking Growth: Strategies for Scaling Your Product Successfully: Taking a product from its initial launch to widespread adoption is a thrilling yet challenging journey. You’ve poured your heart and soul into crafting a solution, but now comes the real test…
  • This is the only Strategy Framework you need. Period.: Get to the bottom of the strategy with this question-based approach and avoid all other frameworks. Strategy is about understanding where you’re headed, why it matters and how to get there.
  • 101 things I would tell my self from 10 years ago: 10 years ago, I started my freshman year of college. This is the advice I needed to hear, not the advice you need to hear. In fact, some of it may be actively bad for you. See Should you reverse any advice you hear? 1. You are overly obedient. You
  • Friends don’t let friends export to CSV: I worked for a few years in the intersection between data science and software engineering. On the whole, it was a really enjoyable time and I’d like to have the chance to do so again at some point. One of the least enjoyable experiences from that time was to deal …
  • The best engineering interview question I’ve ever gotten, Part 1: It’s been a while since I was on the receiving end of a software engineering interview. But I still remember my favorite interview question. It was at MemSQL circa 2013. (They haven’t even kept their name, so I assume they’re not still relying on this specific interview question. I don’t feel bad for revealing it. It’s a great story that I tell people a lot; I’ve just never blogged it before.)
  • Spaghetti all’Assassina (Assassin’s Spaghetti): In this spicy spaghetti all’assassina, spaghetti is cooked raw in tomato sauce.