Old Stuff in the Attic 📦
- A Tour of GenAI — where GenAI came from and where it’s headed
- Mapping Embeddings — from meaning to vectors and back
- I can’t edit them anymore, but some of my older articles are still available on AWS Community
Articles Everyone Should Read 📚
- A Few Useful Things to Know about Machine Learning by Domingos
- Machine Learning that Matters by Wagstaff
- Tidy Data by Wickham
- Hidden Technical Debt by Sculley et al.
- The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data by Halevy, Norvig, and Pereira
- The Bitter Lesson by Rich Sutton
For People in a Hurry 🏃 💨
- Learn X in Y minutes delivers a whirlwind tour of (almost) every programming language — perfect for when you need to pick up a new language yesterday
- Icons and emojis for every occasion and mood
- Too lazy to implement that classic algorithm? The Algorithms has you covered with GitHub’s largest open-source algorithm library
- Hugging Face 🤗 Models lets you experiment with cutting-edge ML models online — completely free
- Need an API? This comprehensive list of publicly available APIs is your new best friend
- Stuck debugging? Invest in a rubber duck — yes, the bathtub kind works best
- Hacker News Digest delivers the top HN stories straight to your inbox every morning — read it after breakfast and skip the comments rabbit hole
For Startup Founders 🐣
- Y Combinator Startup School offers a free 8-week crash course in startup fundamentals — don’t miss it
- Paul Graham’s essays are absolute gems that cut through the entrepreneurship noise — start with how to get startup ideas and 18 mistakes that kill startups
- Peter Thiel’s Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future is provocative and essential — you won’t agree with everything (I don’t!), but you won’t stay indifferent
- Startup Stash curates an extensive toolkit for startup founders and entrepreneurs
Some (Supposedly) Fun Things 🎡
- Nand2Tetris is a journey from NAND gates to Tetris — build a complete modern computer from first principles. It has inspired incredible projects like a 16-bit ALU in Minecraft ⛏🧱
- Charles Petzold’s Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software is an absolute masterpiece that takes you from flashlight morse code 🔦 to the “worldwide hum of the internet” 🌐
- Erik Demaine’s lectures on algorithms and data structures will bend your mind in the best way — his talks on models of computation will forever change how you see Python scripts, while temporal data structures comes with time travel analogies 🕓🚀 and movie references
- Kevin Zurawel’s Game Development in 8 Bits or… Stupid NES Tricks is a masterclass in thriving within creative constraints
- Dan McKinley’s Choose Boring Technology — or “how to be old, for young people”
- Watch Terry Tao formalize a proof of a Marton conjecture in Lean4 — mathematics meets type theory
- Peter Norvig’s pytudes are Python programs that are both delightful and instructive
- Bartosz Ciechanowski’s interactive articles transform mundane objects into fascinating explorations of physics and engineering
- Aditya Bhargava’s X in Pictures series makes functional programming’s scariest words finally click
- Evan Miller’s A/B testing tools — everything you need to design and analyze rigorous experiments
- MinutePhysics explains complex physics in minutes using brilliant whiteboard animations — the boat wakes video is pure joy
- Everything by 3Blue1Brown is visual mathematics and education at its finest… here’s how he creates those mesmerizing animations with Manim
- Love brown-paper math? Numberphile has you covered
- Please don’t say just hello in chat — imagine calling someone, saying hello, then immediately putting them on hold 🤦♀️
- John Herrick’s deep dive into elevator scheduling reveals the surprisingly rich optimization problem hiding behind every elevator ride 🛗
- Sean Goedecke’s Great software design looks underwhelming shows how the best designs eliminate failure modes instead of defending against them
- Cognitive Load Is What Matters argues the whole point of good software design is keeping how much you have to think about to a minimum
- Making Deep Learning Go Brrrr From First Principles and its spiritual sequel GPUs Go Brrr explain exactly why your GPU is bored
- awesome-falsehood catalogs everything programmers confidently get wrong about names, dates, addresses, and more
(Actually) Fun Things 😂
- xkcd — the webcomic where romance meets sarcasm, math meets language, and nerds feel understood
- SMBC — tackling science, philosophy, superheroes, religion, romance, parenting, and the meaning of life with equal parts wit and wisdom
- IP over Avian Carriers (RFC 1149) — networking via carrier pigeons 🐦, featuring gems like “because IP only guarantees best effort delivery, loss of a carrier can be tolerated”
- Naturally, RFC 1149 got a sequel: RFC 2549 adds Quality of Service to the avian carrier protocol via priority pigeons
- Dinosaur Comics reuses the same six panels every single strip, somehow gets more absurdist and philosophical every time
- Gary Bernhardt’s Wat is 4 minutes of pure, legendary JavaScript/Ruby type coercion comedy
- Its serious-but-absurd sequel, The Birth & Death of JavaScript, imagines a future where JS eats the operating system
- wtfjs is a book-length, well-explained catalog of the same insanity —
0.1 + 0.2 !== 0.3,NaN !== NaN,"b" + "a" + +"a" + "a"→"baNaNa" - wtfpython does it for Python, and surprises even seasoned devs (string interning, mutable default args,
isvs==) - wtfjs.com — Brian Leroux’s running blog of “that language we love despite giving us so much to hate”
- JavaScript Equality Table visualizes
==chaos versus===sanity - Eevee’s PHP: a fractal of bad design and PHP Sadness carry the torch for PHP
- Bash Pitfalls — same energy, much higher stakes
- Kevlin Henney’s The Most Bogus Sort is a loving tour of bogosort and friends
- The Daily WTF collects real (anonymized) programming horror stories — “IT Happens,” and it’s tragically funny
- The eXtreme Go Horse Process satirizes the software methodology you’ve definitely worked under at least once
Meta Stuff 🌀
- Love self-replicating code like
_='_=%r;print(_%%_)';print(_%_)? You’ll be obsessed with Quine Relay- Bonus: it’s the most elegant way to crash ChatGPT with an infinite loop ♾️💥
- GitHub hosts an awesome list of awesome lists — cue Russell’s paradox
- Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach is the ultimate journey into self-reference and recursion, featuring Carroll-inspired dialogues and mind-bending insights
- The Atlantic explores why
metadoesn’t mean what you think it does — a meta-commentary on meta itself - Matt Wood (former VP of AI @ AWS) built PartyRock inside PartyRock — recursion meets Amazon Bedrock
- A warning sign warning you about warning signs — you’ve been warned! 🚨
- Google search for “recursion” and it asks “Did you mean: recursion” 🔁
- xkcd’s Self-Description is a comic whose entire content is a legend describing the comic itself