Authormichael

September 16, 2020

The Most Important Thing in a Move

In strategies
September 16, 2020
16September

People ask me a lot about my move from New York City to Mexico City. I made the move two years ago, when I was 30 — I moved from NYC where I had a big professional and friend network to Mexico City where I literally knew no one and I didn’t speak the language. I’m very happy to report that I’m two years into the move and I couldn’t be happier. However, I talk to lots of other foreigners who have...

September 9, 2020

Designing a Foreign-Language Course, Part 2

In Spanish
September 9, 2020
09September

Following up on my last post about my philosophy for a language course for adult learners, in this blog post I wanted to talk a bit about the content for such a course. To start, I want to contrast how this curriculum is designed to work in contrast with “traditional” foreign-language instruction (at least, how I experienced it when I was learning Spanish). While traditional instruction is...

September 1, 2020

Knowledge Sharing

In Technology
September 1, 2020
01September

Because I’m a nerd, I end up frequently talking with people about what the biggest opportunity in the data space is. While there are tons of people working on the next git-for-data and different flavors of data catalogs the problem that I actually feel is most pressing but that very few people seem to be working on is a consistent means of publishing, reproducing, and iterating...

August 25, 2020

Designing a Foreign-Language Course, Part 1

In Spanish
August 25, 2020
25August

I’m starting on a project to think more concretely about what I believe an ideal foreign language course would look like. While all of these thoughts are based on my own experience learning Spanish and may not work as well for people with different brain organizations, I thought it’d be worth at least writing down how I’d use modern technology to design a foreign language course that would be...

August 17, 2020

Gettin’ Goofy on Slack

In strategies
August 17, 2020
17August

I’ve been working remotely for the last two years, so I had the advantage of a decent period of adjustment before the COVID-19 crisis hit and forced the majority of tech workers into a fairly extended (and, perhaps, indefinite?) period of remote work. Lots of pixels have already been spilled with advice about how to make that adjustment, but I want to talk about an oft-overlooked angle that...

August 12, 2020

Funding Open Source Projects

In OpenSource
August 12, 2020
12August

I’ve been thinking a lot about better ways to fund open-source software development. Lots of software that underpins huge amounts of technology today is developed, essentially for free, by people who are super talented and who have a really high opportunity cost for their time. Frequently, valuable (or, at least potentially valuable) projects are started and then abandoned because the original...

July 16, 2020

Dynamic Super Computing in R

In Personal
July 16, 2020
16July

I have for a long time believed that it was a waste to spend a lot of money to have a powerful computer for home and office use because it’s more efficient to dynamically use cloud compute resources rather than rely on my local machine. However, I have also for a long time not actually done that and run all of my jobs on my local machine because I couldn’t actually figure out a good way to make...

June 17, 2020

White Noise

In Books
June 17, 2020
17June

This year I re-read my favorite novel — White Noise by Don Delillo. It’s one of the very few novels I’ve read more than once, and I think this was my third or fourth time through. I won’t recommend it to you, because, and for good reason, there are very few other people who enjoy this novel as much as I do. Most people hate it. However, I’d like to write a bit about...

June 8, 2020

Book Notes: Against the Grain

In Books
June 8, 2020
08June

This year I read both Seeing Like a State and Against the Grain, two books by anthropologist James C. Scott. Seeing Like a State showed how governments systematize and abstract information about a populace in order to make it visible, measurable, and above-all administrative — in particular, Scott talks a lot about how that process of abstraction necessarily loses important on-the-ground...

May 25, 2020

Tech Wages After Covid

In Economics
May 25, 2020
25May

In a few of the tech-oriented slacks I’m a member of there’s been a lot of back-and-forth about what might happen to tech wages in a post-COVID (and during-COVID) world where lots of tech jobs (prominently including more and more major players like Twitter and Facebook) are moving to fully remote. Before getting into this topic, I want to acknowledge what a privilege it is to...