Question from a friend: I am interested in knowing how did you come to this decision of moving to SWE from DS/MLE. Since I’ve been asked a variant of this question quite a few times, I thought it would be good to share my answer. What kind of research did you do to get to this decision? I spoke to a lot of people who were both big companies and startups.

You learn a well-paying skill and years later - it comes back to hurt you in unexpected ways. That’s an Anti Skill. Consider this hypothetical: You start your software engineering career and build a reputation as someone who is good at iOS development. Each year, the money you make keeps improving as you keep getting better at it. The downside? You’ll find it hard to get job offers outside of iOS development [1]

Bulk of this is borrowed from notes made my teammate and friend at Verloop.io’s NLP/ML team of our conversations. I’ve taken the liberty to remove our internal slang and some boring stuff. I want to build a community around me on NLP. How can I get discovered by others? Broadly speaking, the aim in forming connections can be split into Long Term and Short term. A short term aim would be where you can receive something immediate out of the connections or a particular connection itself.

Data Science Org Design for Startups While there is plenty of good advice on making ML work and making a career as a Data Scientist - I think very little discussion happens on the organization design for Data Science itself. This blog will hopefully help folks not just build their team, but also understand the ecosystem from which they are hiring. Organization Design is determined by these 3 broad categories:

This is a 3 part essay. Part 1: Talent In my teenage years, I first understood that the kind of family you’re born into gives you access to certain kinds of wealth e.g. money, network, habits/knowledge and social capital to do things you want. Most people in my peer group and even among the adults I could speak to, used these resources to make their own life materially more comfortable.

This quick entry is partially inspired by a similar entry from Manas Saloi. Ofc, other folks have offered their opinions on Basecamp and earlier Coinbase. The woke mob is shitting on Jason and DHH, but I strongly agree with Basecamp’s new policies. IMHO a company is supposed to create an environment where people come and do their best work without having to align to one side of the political spectrum.

Who is this for? Practitioners who are looking to level up their game in Deep Learning Why Do We Need Instructions on How to Read a Deep Learning Paper? Quantity: There are more papers than we can humanly read even within our own niche. For instance, consider EMNLP - which is arguably the most popular Natural Language Processing conference selects more than 2K papers across a variety of topics. And NLP is just one area!

A useful metaphor to think about character of a person is their financial “net worth”. Like your net worth, this does not mean that you have that much cash to spend. It is a sum total of something. Net Worth is the Sum Total of the Assets & Liabilities Character is the Sum Total of the Decisions you Own: Good and Bad Like your Net Worth can be negative due to a large liability e.

Aditya Ankur, asked me: I know that there is a book for the first 90 days as an executive. Is there something similar for programmers? I don’t quite know of a book/essay which covers this yet sticks to the question. So I am writing one for him. The First 90 Days for a New Engineer I expect each step to take roughly between 10 and 30 days, depending on the pace of your project + size of the team.