A list of blogs, websites, and podcasts that I enjoy from time to time or that provided useful advice to me in the past.

Blogs and websites

Tech / management / thinking

• Sean Goedecke’s blog   - A blog on working in technology companys from the perspective of a staff engineer.
• Ben Kuhn’s blog   - A blog about programming, engineering management, and books reviews.
• Irrational Exuberance   - A blog where Will Larson shares his experience on engineering management and strategy.
• Ian Whitestone’s blog   - Ian blogs on data science and data engineering topics.
• Simon Willison’s blog   - Simon Willison’s notes and TILs
• Farnam Street   - A collection of mental models.
• Bytepawn   - Data science methods and management focused blog.
• Mark Litwintschik’s blog   - Very cool data wrangling projects.
• Julia Evan’s blog   - Technical deep dives combined with simple explanations.
• Giles Thomas’ blog   - Technical writing on Python and recently on writing your own LLMs.

Finance

• Money Stuff   - Matt Levine has a great way of breaking down the inner workings of financial products and institutions using simple words and he is doing it with a great sense of very dry humour.
• Monevator   - A UK focused blog on personal investing and financial independence.
• Rent vs. Buy Calculator   - A free calculator that can aid with the rent vs. buy decision
• Capital Gains   - A newsletter archive about finance, economics, and corporate strategy.

Research / PhD advice

• Gregory Gundersen’s blog   - great collection of notes on math, ML, probability that Gregory uses to explain a topic to himself.
• Julian Schrittwieser’s blog   - Julian is a software engineer at Deep Mind and tasks about a range of interesting research topics.
• Matt Might’s blog   - Awesome PhD advice from Matt Might. Especially his ‘The illustrated guide to a Ph.D.’ really helped me put my research into perspective.

Economics

• Marginal Revolution   - Tyler Cowen’s and Alex Tabarrok’s blog on economics, culture, politics and country developments.

Misc

• seat61.com   - if you want to travel Europe on the train this blog has all the information you could ever want.

• Bartosz Ciechanowski - Bartosz pushes the boundary on explaining concepts on a website, see Mechanical Watch   or Bicycle   .

Newspaper

• Financial Times Weekend edition

Podcasts

Every episode:

• Money Stuff: The Podcast
• This is Politics
• Dwarkesh Podcast

Some episodes:

• BBC In Our Time
• The Rational Reminder Podcast
• Conversations with Tyler
• Lex Friedman Podcast
• Philosophize This
• Stuff You Should Know
• The Knowledge Project
• FT News Briefing
• Acquired
• The Riff

Articles

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

Work and team management

• 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.

Career advice

• 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 follows this trope 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.

• Productivity advice   (zhengdongwang.com)
  Zhendong Wang’s collected quotes on productivity advice.

PhD advice

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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 some 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.

Data science and statistics

• Causal Inference for The Brave and True   (matheusfacure.github.io)
  A great introduction into the theory behind causal 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.

Blogging

• 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.

Misc

• 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.

• Things you are allowed to do   (milan.cvitkovic.net)
  Literally a list of things you are allowed to do.

• 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.

• 50 years of travel tips   (kk.org)
  Kevin Kelly’s travel tips.