Exploring Ideas: A Blog on Technology, Startups, Food, and More
Welcome to my blog where I share thoughts and insights on technology, startups, and life in Atlanta. Browse through the articles below or explore by topic.
Journalism and the Perfect Pitch Deck
February 15, 2016
Having been pretty immersed in the VC funded startup experience at Predikto for a couple of years now, I have (counter to what I would have ever thought), taken an intellectual curiosity to pitch decks, including studying great examples like LinkedIn’s fantastically annotated deck from their Series B. Despite having pretty much always been in some sort of engineering, I don’t come from a family of...
Git-pandas v1.0.0, or how to check for a stable release
February 2, 2016
In the process of making the v1.0.0 release of git-pandas, I had one primary goal: to simplify and solidify the interface to git-pandas objects (the ProjectDirectory and the Repository). At the end of the day, the usefulness of a project like git-pandas versus one off analysis or rolling your own interface is consistent and predictable interfaces to commonly used functions. So with that in mind, I...
Github.com cumulative blame in 5 lines of python
January 31, 2016
Git-pandas has gotten to be pretty capable. Currently in the master branch and soon to be in the v1.0.0 release, we’ve included a github.com interface to git-pandas via the GitHubProfile class. With this, in just a few lines of code, you can see how your profile has grown over time: from gitpandas.utilities.plotting import plot_cumulative_blame from gitpandas import GitHubProfile g = GitHubProfile...
Decision Strategies: Beyond Expected Value
January 28, 2016
Oftentimes when making some kind of uncertain decision, the decision maker will use a measure such as expected value to make that decision. Imagine the case of a single coin flip where the better pays 5 dollars to play, and gets 2 dollars for heads and 10 dollars for tails. The expected value of this game is to pay 5 dollars to enter and make 6 dollars, giving an expected one dollar profit. But th...
Data-driven engineering team management with gitnoc and git-pandas
January 19, 2016
The management of engineering projects is very very different when it scales outside of one developer, and even more so when it scales outside of one repository. Devops and source control aside, as the number of contributors and repos increases, the ability for a manager to keep track of each developer and repository relative to each other increases in kind. Data, especially incomplete data, canno...
Create organization-wide punchcards with git-pandas
January 17, 2016
In preparation for the v1.0.0 release of git-pandas, I’m going through the library and trying to stabilize the inputs and outputs across all functions. The idea is that there should be a common language for interacting with these objects, whether they by single repositories or project directories, and regardless of which function you are interacting with. I’m also trying to lower the barrier to en...
How to Write Comprehensions and Alienate People
January 8, 2016
Python list comprehensions are a powerful feature that can make code more concise and readable. But like any powerful tool, they can also be misused to create code that’s virtually incomprehensible. Here’s a guide to writing comprehensions that will make your colleagues wonder if you’re actually writing Python or inventing a new language. The Basics of Alienation Start with simple list comprehensi...
Gitpandas v0.0.6: python 2.7, fileowners, file-wise blame and examples
January 7, 2016
After the last release about two weeks ago, I’ve focused the development in git-pandas around testing, documentation, and bugfixes in preparation for the first major release, v1.0.0. In this release, we’ve added: Support for python 2.7 Testing and integration with Travis-CI and Coveralls Revision name was added to the file change history dataframe Blame can be done file-wise throughout the project...
Market-Product fit vs Product-Market fit
December 28, 2015
Marc Andreessen originally coined the phrase product/market fit in the statement: “Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.” Since then, many prominent entrepreneurs and investors have built up process and theory around this idea to formalize its definition and generalize how to find it. The gist of it is that a startup should quickly build a min...
Git-Pandas v0.0.5: coverage.py, risk, and more
December 25, 2015
The fifth release of git-pandas just hit pypi, install with: pip install -U git-pandas It includes a few neat features: Basic introduction of support for .coverage files as well, including checking if that exists at all in the first place A file change rate table that includes time rates of addition, change and other metrics aimed at identifying files that may be at a higher than normal risk of bu...
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