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.

Read On →

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.

Read On →

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:

Read On →

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.

Read On →

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.

Read On →