Writing on traviscj/blog

hype channels

Mon, 23 Aug 2021 21:20:31 -0500

When I was managing a small team, one of the coolest protips I came across was the idea of a “hype channel”. This builds on the idea of a “hype doc” by changing the medium: instead of writing into a document, you write blurbs on your own private Slack channel.

I’m not sure whether this would help anyone but me, but maybe it’ll help someone else drowning in Chrome tabs?

tradeoffs

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Life is (just) a series of tradeoffs.

DawnAnn “Mom” Johnson

I heard this so many times growing up that I think I actually stopped hearing it. But recently, I realized that it’s never been more pertinent than to my current day-to-day life as a software engineer.

The fundamental tradeoff we make on the Risk Systems team is trading off between

how much fraud we catch (and symmetrically, miss!)
how many false positives we incur to catch that much fraud

Those false positives running rampant can inhibit growth (in terms of interested customers) of the product we’re trying to protect, but letting too much fraud through can make a product too expensive (and even liable to be shut down!)

Naming is hard (so don't)

Sun, 07 Oct 2018 02:31:43 +0000

A lot of times I just want to record something. This should be one of those things computers are good at. Turns out this is a bit harder than it seems: many editors make you name a file to save it.

One easy-sounding way to record something is:

open up a text editor
mash the keyboard until the thought is out of your head and into the text editor
(hard part starts) what do we name that file?
where do we put that file?
do we remember to save that file, given the difficulty of (3) & (4)?

I think picking names too early is at best a minor annoyance, and at worst a pretty major distraction.

profitably wrong

Tue, 09 Jan 2018 08:00:00 +0000

I’ve come to realize that my career so far has been built on being “profitably wrong.” I think this is interesting because the usual approaches are being “profitably fast” (optimizing) or “profitably better” (improving), and most people think of any kind of wrongness as being a terrible thing. But sometimes the best way to optimize or improve is approximating!

The definitions of “profitably” has changed as I’ve worked on different things, as has the specific type of “wrongness”. A couple specific ways accepting “wrongness” have been profitable for me include:

_useful

Mon, 03 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I often create a directory/file called _useful/_useful.org/_useful.txt. I have one in my Dropbox, for example, that contains:

My apartment lease
My car/motorcycle insurance details
A textfile with my vehicle plate numbers/VINs/insurance policy numbers.

At work, I have one with

the top visited links for logs/metrics/admin interfaces for the services I work with most
a list of links of “typical” or “exemplar” things
- links to our internal tool views for typical payments, merchants, etc
- typical size (in bytes) of various protobuf messages we use a lot, size of 1M messages, #messages in 1MB/GB
common coding idioms, like several variants of @RunWith that we use in various cases in our test code.
useful commands for doing stuff (curl/SQL/plain old shell)

Plain text is great for all the reasons it usually is. But it’s especially useful here (see what I did there?) because the file loads much faster than Google Docs or wiki pages, it’s grep-able, it’s trivial to copy to a new machine, there’s no fuss about futzing with the document to get it to format properly, and soforth.

oblique programming strategies

Wed, 07 Dec 2016 23:05:28 +0000

Ever since I found out about it (probably on Hacker News), the idea of Oblique Strategies has fascinated me. The first editions are going on ebay for $2500-$3300 bucks, which I think is incredible. If you’re curious and impatient, you can check out this list on github.

One recent sleepness night, I made a list of “oblique programming strategies” on my phone, transcribed here. They are not as starkly polished as Eno’s version (unsurprisingly), but might be useful to you!

Getting really fast at LaTeX

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Taking LaTeX notes in real time is one of my favorite useless party tricks. I started developing my techniques during the last year or two of undergraduate work at University of Washington, and was extremely good at it by the end of coursework at Northwestern. There are several keys to taking LaTeX notes in real time:

Know LaTeX.
Shortcut appropriately.
Type keystrokes quickly.
One keystroke re-renders.
Type fewer keystrokes.
Type fewer “strange” keystrokes (backslashes, curly braces, etc)
Re-renders should scroll to your current location in the text.
Extremely rapid debugging of LaTeX expressions.

Before I get started, one other note: I mention TextMate a few places, but in principle there is no reason you couldn’t configure all the same things in Vim, Emacs, or Sublime Text. If I was starting over, I might use Sublime Text instead.

What could you possibly do with mathematics?

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, at a family gathering, I was confronted by the question many a college graduate is faced after telling someone I had majored in mathematics for my now-finished college degree: “But how are you going to make any money at that?”

Now, certainly it’s true: Graduate students don’t make that much. The average stipend for a grad student is roughly on par with (but still less than) unemployment checks. But that’s okay–in general, mathematicians know that they could make money other places, but they chose it anyways because of their love for the subject. Not that mathematicians make too bad of money anyway: The average in the US is about 50K, with associate professors making more than that. The particularly salary-inclined could pick up other credentials to become actuaries or work in hedge funds.

Goodbye, Walter Cronkite

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I am in no way qualified to write a proper goodbye to the late Mr. Cronkite–him having retired a half-decade before I was born–but I have the greatest respect for the man, and wish in a lot of ways that I could have been around for it. On the other hand, reviewing videos of his newscasts, what strikes me is the massive impact and bleakness of many of these newscasts and how that contrasts with the emptiness of many more recent newscasts that I can recall. So most of my wistfulness revolves around our shared interest in spaceflight, his reporting obsession and a large source of my own scientific curiosity. I couldn’t say it better than Couric’s memorial commentary, which posited ‘It’s a measure of the man that he preferred the triumph of the space program to the despair in so much of the news,’ and that is certainly the way it was.

Wiki Problems

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I really like the idea of having a wiki website. It’s great to be able to share documents really easily, be able to edit stuff without logging in, track changes you’ve made, and so on.

I have also tried quite a few wiki setups, including MediaWiki(mostly at a job a while back and a spectacular success), MoinMoin, and PmWiki. However, each of them fell flat in a certain annoying way.

Dijkstra's Algorithm Paper

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The week before my sister’s wedding, I was tasked with writing a paper on Dijkstra’s Algorithm for my Discrete Mathematical Modeling class. I think I might have missed the mark a little bit, but I had so much fun writing it that I’m posting it here.

I’m almost considering writing some more stuff in this style… anything anyone would like to see written about?

Here’s a link: Dijkstra’s Algorithm

Differential Equations

Mon, 12 May 2008 12:00:00 +0000

I’ve realized that a lot of people are nervous about differential equations. Which is understandable, but in general there’s some pretty straightforward ways to solve a fair number of the ones you come across. I’d really like to write some of it up.

My basic idea is going to be, show a bit about integrating factors, a bit about separation of variables, the characteristic equation, and the method of undetermined coefficients. That covers a lot of physical territory. Then some about reducing order with transformations from n-th order equations to n 1-st order equations, and basic Laplace for a sortof general method. And finally, maybe a tiny bit about numeric methods.