Newsletter Covid Edition

“Hey all you cool cats and kittens…” It's been a while. A lot of people have been asking about the blog. I'm still at it. Still reading. The last three months have been rough. We can probably all agree on that. My consumption of news and media during this time led to unhealthy thoughts. I took a media detox, connected more with friends and loved ones, and reset my state of mind. I love reading and paying to support quality journalism. The work journalists are doing, especially right now, is valuable, but I'm also aware that constantly reading about the state of the world is exhausting and depressing.

Below you'll find links I've saved throughout this time. I've done my best to group them into categories that might interest you.

Have a great week.

Houston

Links

General

• It's Time to Build

• Hard Startups

• We All Wear Tinfoil Hats Now

• Mushroom Management

• Computers are Fast

• Why We At Famous Company Switched to Hyped Technology

• Beer Distribution Game

• Working Class Death Rate

• Founder Stories: Marc Andreessen

• A Chronobiological Evaluation of the Acute Effects of Daylight Saving Time on Traffic Accident Risk

• Thomas Piketty Goes Global

• The Art of Business, Where Science and Business Depart

• Become Abnormal

• The Perils of Private Provision of Public Goods

• Cash is King: Flows, Balances, and Buffer Days

• Would you eat recycled landfill meat? - BBC News (Video)

• The North Face Presents: Lhotse ft. Hilaree Nelson & Jim Morrison (Video)

Math

• A 2020 Vision of Linear Algebra
• Radical Solutions
• Mathematics Invented or Discovered
• This One Equation Takes Pythagoras to a Whole New Level
• Product of Negatives

COVID

• My Thoughts on Coronavirus - Ray Dalio

• How to Respond to COVID19

• Simulating an epidemic (Video)

• A Viral Market Meltdown: Fear or Fundamentals? (Video)

Actuarial

• Actuarial Systems Evolution
• The Importance of Centralization of Actuarial Modeling Functions, Part 2

I don't want to be in the business of trashing articles, but I loathe articles like those above.

• Spreadsheets - Dilbert Strip 2007
• Are VBA Macros Dead
• Yield curve modelling and a conceptual framework for estimating yield curve

R

• Mastering Shiny
• R Package: projmgr
• List Columns in Data.Table
• Unit Tests in R
• Writing R in VSCode
• Persistent config and data for R packages

Data Science and Machine Learning

• How to be Seen as an Expert in Artificial Intelligence
• Analysis Flow
• Machine Learning Technical Debt
• Forecasting S-Curves is Hard
• Machine Learning. Kolmogrov Complexity. Squishy Bunnies.
• Data Science Reality vs Expectations
• Open Sourcing Riskquant: A Library for Quantifying Risk
• Using Docker for Data Science

Statecharts

I went down quite the rabbit hole on state machines and statecharts. They're a useful mental model particularly in finance and actuarial.

• xstate.js
• statecharts
• How I Learned to Stop Worrying and ❤️ the State Machine
• More State Machine ❤️: From Reflection to Statecharts

Programming & Software Development

• Always Be Journaling

• On the Shoulder of the Giants

• Cultivate the Skill of Undivided Attention or Deep Work

• Technical Debt

• A Big Ball of Mud

• Simple Systems Have Less Downtime

• Branching Patterns

• Happiness is a Freshly Organized Codebase

• Sounds Easy

• You're Not Writing Code You're Solving Problems

• Libraries Not Frameworks

• How I Became A Better Programmer

• Time is the Real Currency

• What Happens When You Lack Senior Engineering Leadership

• Reactive Manifesto

• Tech Writing

• Getting Real

• Table Logging in Julia

• Windows Terminal 1.0

• Fundamentals of Web Apps

• Microservices (Video)

Are there any topics or concepts you'd like me to write more about? Send any suggestions to hp@houstonp.com.

If you stumble across something interesting, send it my way! You can send any recommendations to links@houstonp.com. If you haven't done so yet, subscribe to get all my posts delivered directly to your email.