Articles

Articles that I enjoyed reading in the past and that left an impression on me. Summarized in no more than three sentences.

The Update, The Vent, and The Disaster (randsinrepose.com) Michael Lopp’s approach on how to get the most out of 1:1 meetings between manager and developer. Spoiler: It’s not about status updates.
The last 1% (jaredramsey.com)
A reminder that when we build projects we typically skip the last 1% (documentation, performance metrics, monitoring, testing, alerts) producing headache for us in the future.
Remote work requires communicating more, less frequently (ben.balter.com)
Ben argues that to get the benefits of remote work we need to change team communication. Instead of quick, frequent, low-detail communication, we should embrace “asynchronous, higher fidelity” communication. Asynchronicity allows us to spend more time on distilling and clarifying ideas, opinions and solutions before sharing them.
The Hiring Post (sockpuppet.org) A comprehensive blog post on establishing a hiring process for software engineers to identify good engineers not good interview-takers.
Some mistakes I made as a new manager (benkuhn.net)
Ben talks about common issues and avoidance strategies that new managers go through. Resonated well with me.
FAQs from Coaching Technical Leadership (kellanem.com)
A short note on common problems in tech leadership. Points 2) and 3) summarize the main things we can do as managers to align the team.

Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued (kalzumeus.com)
A great guide on salary negotiation in tech companies that I have used successfully. According to this podcast with Tylor Cowen Patrick McKenzie’s blog post is read hundreds of thousands of times a year.
Advice to Myself When Starting Out as a Software Developer (blog.pragmaticengineer.com)
I didn’t start my career as a software engineer, but this list is equally useful for freshly minted data scientists/data engineers.
The Thinner Book: Atomic Habits by James Clear (chrisbehan.ca)
“Most self-help books should be a blog post.” is a common complaint. Chris has inverted the mapping and summarizes the main advice on building better habits.
Buy-side Quant Job Advice Mostly advice on how to get a job as a quantitative researcher. However, some of the advice generalizes well for other research-focused jobs.
Don’t call yourself a programmer (kalzumeus.com)
An industry 101 for software engineers. The advice applies well for data engineers and data scientists too.
How I practice at what I do (marginalrevolution.com)
Tyler Cowen thinks knowledge workers should practise as deliberately as pro basketball players or pianists. He shares his own strategies.

You and your research (cs.utexas.edu)
Richard Hamming’s advice on working on the right research questions, at the right time, and in the right way.
How to read a technical paper (cs.jhu.edu)
A great overview by Jason Eisner on how to read a technical paper. He explains his system for multiple passes, what parts to focus on, and how to take notes.
A Survival Guide to a PhD (karpathy.github.io)
A great article when you are about to start with your PhD. He describes how to chose an adviser and find a research topic, write code and papers, as well as give a talk at a conference.
Rules to write a good research paper (lemire.me)
High-level advice for writing a good research paper.
The Rules for happily collaborating on a LaTeX document (3d.bk.tudelft.nl)
Convincing my PhD advisors to use git to collaborate on LaTeX documents saved me a lot of time.Hugo shares so rules he uses when collaborating on a shared document.
Read papers, Not too much, Mostly foundational ones (muratbuffalo.blogspot.com)
Starting a PhD and trying to understand a field is difficult. The number of papers one could read is overwhelming. The blog post gives advice on how to decide what and how many papers to read.
Rules for conferences (milan.cvitkovic.net)
Make the most out of attentding technical conferences. I like the advice for conversations to focus on understanding your opponent’s research questions and see if you can help them.

Causal Inference for The Brave and True (matheusfacure.github.io)
A great introduction into the theory behind casual inference and various methods to find causal mechanisms.
Seven basic rules for causal inference (pedermisager.org)
Causal inference is a topic that passed me by in university. I only really learned about it after reading Causal Inference for The Brave and True and Statistical Rethinking . This page is a great cheat sheet about the rules you should follow when distilling causal structures from correlations in your data.
Frequentist A/B testing tutorial (ethen8181.github.io)
A nice refresher on frequentist A/B testing, the underlying assumptions, and common pitfalls. Useful to have the complementing code examples.

Why and how to write things on the Internet (benkuhn.net)
The title of the blog post tells you what it’s about, which is also one of the recommendations Ben gives in this post.
Why your blog still needs RSS (journal.paoloamoroso.com)
Paolo argues that RSS is one of the few options besides newsletters to establish a direct communication channel to your readers that is not controlled by third parties.
Visits from page views (franz.hamburg)
How Franz implemented non-intrusive website analytics using server logs and SQLite.

Fast (patrickcollison.com)
A collection of ambitious projects from the 20th century that were completed at remarkable speed. Makes you think why modern projects are prone to overrun budgets and deadlines.
The housing theory of everything (worksinprogress.co)
A great overview of the obvious and non-obvious societal cost of expensive housing.
Friendcatchers - Win Friends Online While You Sleep (swyx.io)
Giving away useful things (essays, lists, scripts, cheatsheets) for free as a way to create new connections.