kchodorow

A magic trick

I was standing on the street corner with Domino and a group of schoolkids came up. “Hey, can I show you a magic trick?” one of them asked. “Uh…” “Think of a number,” he said. “Ok.” “Now add 4 to it.” “Ok.” “Now add 5 to it.” “Ok.” “Now add 1 to it.” “Ok.” “NowContinue reading “A magic trick”

R&R

Andrew and I just took a month off to relax in a cabin in the woods. We are extremely fortunate to have jobs and lives that allow us to take off this kind of time, because boy did I need it. At the beginning of our trip, I was hoping to get so much done:Continue reading “R&R”

P.T. Barnum on salary vs. equity

I’ve been reading P.T. Barnum’s autobiography and came across an interesting passage about when he was employed at Mr. Taylor’s (maybe of Lord & Taylor’s? Not sure) shop: My employer manifested great interest in me, and treated me with the upmost kindness, but the situation did not suit me. The fact is, there are someContinue reading “P.T. Barnum on salary vs. equity”

My favorite benefits that more companies should offer

Google is famous for its perks, but the ones that ended up being my favorite were not the free food: Peer bonuses Anyone at Google can nominate a coworker for a peer bonus. They write a couple sentences about what the person did and send it to their manager for approval. It’s a really niceContinue reading “My favorite benefits that more companies should offer”

BizSpark

Many years ago, I was speaking at a PHP meetup and got talking to a guy who worked at Microsoft. He told me about Microsoft’s BizSpark program, which lets startups use Microsoft’s software for free. As MongoDB was about a dozen people at the time, I filled out the application and started using PowerPoint forContinue reading “BizSpark”

The next great frontier in ML: dogs in hats

I’ve been messing around with Keras, a ML library that makes it pretty easy to do AI experiments. I decided to try out image recognition, so I found a picture of Domino in a fez: Then I wrote the following Python program which uses the existing ResNet50 image recognition library. import numpy as np fromContinue reading “The next great frontier in ML: dogs in hats”

Keeping your deps tidy

My coworker Carmi just published a blog post on the Bazel blog about how Java tracks dependencies. Bazel has some nice facilities built in to let you know when you need to add dependencies: ERROR: /home/kchodorow/test/a/BUILD:24:1: Building libA.jar (1 source file) failed: Worker process sent response with exit code: 1. A.java:6: error: [strict] Using typeContinue reading “Keeping your deps tidy”

GitHub notification… notifier

Here is what my inbox look like each morning: All those pink-tagged messages are emails from GitHub. Gmail cannot figure out which ones are important and GitHub’s notification stream, in my experience, is useless. It’s noisy and doesn’t clear the way I’d expect. The problem is, people actually do mention me on bugs. And IContinue reading “GitHub notification… notifier”

Life hacks

I was thinking about a couple of little things that have made my life a lot better in the last year and I figured I’d share: Buying cheese powder I love mac & cheese, particularly Annie’s sharp cheddar. However, 1) they always give too many noodles and not enough cheese and 2) Annie’s switched overContinue reading “Life hacks”

How to Skylark – the class

I’ve heard a lot of users say they want a more comprehensive introduction to writing build extensions for Bazel (aka, Skylark). One of my friends has been working on Google Classroom and they just launched, so I created a build extensions crash course. I haven’t written much content yet (and I don’t understand exactly howContinue reading “How to Skylark – the class”