2021-07-18
Podcasts
- David Epstein on People I (Mostly) Admire. Most interesting is the discussion on learning and knowledge retention. Ease is almost surely a sign you are not learning as much as you think. The bit on Fermi estimation (i.e. back of the envelope estimating everything) is also something I would like to try and incorporate into my thinking more.
- Lex Friedman’s interview with Roger Reaves is a trip. Laughing about insane torture in a Mexican Prison, running through the hills from federales. What different lives we lead.
Articles / blog posts
- The data team: a short story. Erik Bernhardson is a data legend. He was one of the earliest data people at Spotify and wrote the first versions of some of their legendary recommendation algorithms. He also churns out some very creative and insightful blog posts, including this one that imagines the first year of the new head of the data team at a mid stage startup. However, the lens is organizational and many of the lessons apply to data teams in much wider contexts. Definitely recommended if you like to think about using data in an organizational setting.
Books
- Giant by Edna Ferber. Queen in 1952, it’s about the mantra of Texas in the first half of the twentieth century. I like reading it with an eye to the tech industry with its new wealth and strange and insular culture. The Texan motto Everything is bigger in Texas could just as easily apply to the hundreds of Silicon Valley funded startups aiming to Uber, Airbnb, etc. I heard of this book through Vicki Boykis so my mind was naturally primed to make connections to tech.
Notes
I started eight weeks of parental leave this week and it was one of the most exhausting in memory. We went camping as a family - my wife, our two girls (26 and 6 months), and me. There were a lot of wonderful moments along with many stressful ones. I have done loads of camping and backpacking in the past, but it is a whole new world with a toddler and an infant. Where getting away from all of the usual distractions and obligations in the past would mean substantial down time for reading, dozing, reflecting, etc. now every bit of that space is filled to the brim with kid stuff. Much of the time this is fun and much more worthwhile than whatever mundane thing I would be doing instead, but the cumulative effect of having free time compressed to nearly nothing is manageable at best. Add to that two days of preparation and several days of skipped naps, late nights, early mornings and lots of new and exciting activities and environments and you’ve got a perfect recipe for kiddos on the edge. It’s still fun, but it demands much more of a person (parent).
All this is to say that I have read and listened to less this week than under normal conditions. It’s hard to say how this will evolve over the next few weeks as I will be spending substantially less time at the computer and more time engaging with the kids. I imagine as we get our dual leave home routine dialed ini will find More time to consume information. Time will tell.