Leo Messi in America has reached peak hype, and for a good reason. 36 year old forward started his North American career on the rightest of feet, scoring in every game of the Leagues Cup (for a total of 11 goals in 7 games) and taking Inter Miami (last place in the MLS Eastern conference prior to his arrival) to the title. As is the case every twenty years or so, many believe this is the moment when soccer finally takes off in America.…

As universities are switching to 100% remote teaching in the coming semester, many undergraduate students should strongly consider getting a “DIY” CS degree: take the same courses you would at your own school, but on any one of the online Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) platforms, like Coursera or edX. Advantages Cost: this one is a no-brainer. According to US News one year of college tuition costs $10,116 on average for in-state students at a public school, and $36,801 on average at private schools.…

It’s been a while. Running my blog off of a WordPress on EC2 was just very… undelightful :) It was a pain to maintain, it cost a lot to run (in relative terms), it was ugly and slow. I kept wanting to write but the experience was so cringy I never did. So I decided it was time for a change. I came up with what I think a blog should be like in 2020:…

As a hiring manager, I’m probably looking at a hundred candidate profiles a week, at least. Here are some common mistakes you can fix and improvements you can make right now as a candidate / job seeker, to increase your chances to find a job. This is biased for software engineering roles, but many things apply to any role. Profile picture The recruiter will be looking at your online presence and the first thing humans look at are the picture.…

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics. Benjamin Disraeli With the elections less than two weeks away, many have already proclaimed Hillary Clinton as the winner. This is based on Clinton’s overwhelming dominance in the polls and election forecasts. I’d like to show that the race, based on what we know now, is much closer than what most of us think, in two very meaningful ways:…

We live in a glorious time: information is more accessible to us than at any time in the past, by far. A middle schooler in a small town has access to more information using her phone today than a Nobel Prize winning researcher did in 1900 using the greatest library of the time. Unfortunately, our mental capacity as humans did not progress as much, on average. This led to a situation where we are incapable to process the huge amount of information we’re being bombarded with.…

Disclaimer: this is a highly speculative, controversial-on-purpose post. Historic events and data is mostly fact. Predictions and forward-looking analysis are mine, based on gut feelings and what-if thinking, not based on fact. This is just a friendly reminder that in September 1999, a few months before the presidential election that brought him to power, Putin staged “terrorist attacks” in multiple cities across Russia in which 298 people lost their lives. The Chechen rebels were blamed for the bombings.…

Twitter is rolling out their polls feature. How many normal Twitter users care about polls? That’s obviously not going to be a big deal in terms of solving “Twitter’s problems” of not growing fast enough and not generating a ton of revenue. Twitter Polls is an ideal example of something that should just be a third party app. In a world where you can build apps on top of Twitter that seamlessly integrate into the Twitter UI and/or can live outside of it - this is an interesting product for a small team to build on top of Twitter.…

Beyond the usual hoopla over the Facebook acquisition of Oculus VR hides a truly spectacular feat of individual Making (capital M) and a huge milestone in the history of (crowd)funding and selling a business. In my mind, it even eclipses the acquisition of WhatsApp just a month ago, as well as the acquisition of Instagram (all by the same acquirer, more on that in a bit). Palmer Luckey, the founder and inventor of the Rift, began working on the product sometime around 2009 as a student at USC.…

As more and more sad details surface about Apple’s legal crusade, I keep thinking why I’m using the iPhone and don’t just switch to an Android. Yeah, it’s not as good still, and I always told myself I’ll get an Android phone eventually, when they’re good enough. But then it hit me: It doesn’t matter. Apple is not going to lose only because eventually its customers will switch to the competitors’ products.…