2023: My Year In Review
2023 was quite the year. In keeping with tradition, I wrote about my year in this post and what I hope the next year brings, with gratitude for all I have.
‘What Are AI Agents?’: An Introduction to AI Agents and LLMs
As some of you may already know, over the summer I wrote a book/report for O’Reilly Media on AI agents and large language models. I am now pleased to announce that as of this month (November 2023) it has been published—you can find it here! As the book’s title suggests, What Are AI Agents? When […]
Publishing For O’Reilly
In a bit of surreal news, I’m happy to announce that with the imminent publishing of "What Are AI Agents? When and How to Use LLM Agents" I will officially be an O’Reilly author. To say it is meaningful to me to write for O’Reilly doesn’t quite capture it. Without O’Reilly authors or the editors […]
I Paid Off $194k in Student Loans in Six Years. It Wasn’t Easy.
Table of Contents Disbelief In which I accomplish a long sought after financial goal and determine the need to reflect on how it came to be. Adventures in Aliens and Castration In which I discuss a ruined scheme to bypass a formal education. “Deer”, Dear Friends In which I discuss the forces that led to […]
I Waited 9 Years to Write This: On The Death of a Friend
Thank you to the McCausland family for reviewing this post before it was published. On February 1st, 2014, in the early hours of the morning, my friend Sarah McCausland was struck and killed by a drunk driver. She was walking back to campus with her friends near Bard College. She had only recently turned 19. […]
2022: My Year In Review
What Did I Do This Year? As 2022 winds down, I’ve found myself looking back and wondering: what did I do that matters to me? In many ways, it was a blur. Being a founding member of a seed-stage startup will do that to you, not to mention moving to a new state and all […]
Building An HTTPS Model API for Cheap: A Step-by-Step Guide to Deploying APIs to AWS on Your Own Domain
Intro If you’re reading this post then you probably want to learn how to deploy a docker container to AWS cheaply, quickly, and without much ado. Perhaps you’ve seen my NormConf Talk "Building an HTTPS API for Cheap: AWS, Docker, and the NormConf API". In the example below, I will push a FastAPI app that […]
The *Right* Way to Maintain Multiple GitHub Accounts Using 1Password’s SSH Key Agent
Introduction Recently I was building a new repo in GitHub and realized I needed a new SSH key to push to GitHub. Upon bringing up GitHub’s SSH creation UI, I was prompted by 1Password with a "Create SSH Key…" option. Apparently I had opted into SSH-key creation 1Password and forgotten. What ensued was a few […]
Legacy Naming Conventions Are Holding Us Back
Introduction Let’s see if this sounds familiar: It’s your first day at Finch—an e-commerce startup that sells bird food and supplies. As you’re onboarded you’re gradually introduced to the company’s internal services. First there’s Macaw, a wrapper around Airflow DAGs; then there’s Senegal, which leverages Terraform; of course, you’ll need Falcon which ingests avro files […]
Pandas Functions: Advanced Groupbys with Grouper, Assign, and Query
Introduction Pandas groupbys are some of the most useful functions in a data scientist’s toolkit. And yet, time and again I have found that colleagues do not realize the flexibility these ubiquitous functions can grant them. In the following post, I will demonstrate some of my favorite uses of groupbys in the hope that it […]