Voyageur Technologique
Graphic Novel Recommendations 2023
I’ve read over 100 graphic novels in the last 6 months. There are only two that I would universally recommend: Ducks by Kate Beaton Shortcoming by Adrian Tomine Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton This is the graphic novel I would give to describe Canada to a non-Canadian. On the surface, its a memoir about working in the Albertan oil sands to pay off student loans, but it touches on so many vaguely Canadian themes.
Tools I love and hate
No one wants to read a series of blog posts about the various tools I use on a daily basis and how I feel about them. But maybe someone wants to read one blog post? Love Bandcamp Lets me buy + download music from all my favourite artists and then gets the hell out of my way. Complice I wrote a love-letter to you. 5 years later the love is still going strong.
Mini Book Reviews 2019-2021
Extracting the short (mostly 3 paragraphs or less) book reviews I’ve written from a private group chat onto my blog, because fuck Goodreads and Amazon. Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Christopher Voss and Tahl Raz Excessively long given the simplicity of the content. Instead, read: Patrick McKenzie’s post on salary negotiation Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher and William Ury, which is a classic, while also being shorter Nitpicks:
Podcasts 2021
In October 2019, I got bronchitis and listened to a bunch of podcasts while I recovered, at the recommendation of my old labmate Brent Komer. Later during COVID, I started listening to podcasts more often to feel less lonely. These are the podcasts I enjoy the most, ordered according to educational value. Farm to Taber Dr. Sarah Taber is a crop scientist with a spicy Twitter account. Her podcast is less spicy, but it still fights preconceptions around agriculture and the incentives driving its current manifestation in America.
Eternal Disagreements in Computer Science
Concepts which refuse to be nailed down
Differentiating concrete concepts from fuzzy categories is an essential step to mastering a domain. This took me years in Computer Science, because practitioners often deny categories are ambiguous. Thus, for all the noobs out there, here is a list of unanswerable questions. I’ve wasted hours of my life searching for definite answers to each of them. Whether to taboo these words or embrace their subjectivity is a personal choice. But at the very least, you should know that if someone claims to have an unassailable answer to any of these questions, they’re a gosh-darned liar.