The Professional Programmer

When was the last time you tried to teach a 1 year old to decipher x-rays? My guess is never, and with good reason. It makes no sense.

I used to work in HPC (as evidenced in my posts on AoS vs SoA and AoSoAs ), but my interest has always been nature-inspired algorithms, like genetic algorithms . But there's a nature-inspired algorithm that is getting lots of attention these days: neural networks. People think of them as black boxes, but in this post I'll try to peel back the top and explain what's going on inside.

We've all done it before. As a recovering academic, it was practically part of my job description: work until complete burnout. But if you want to have a long, productive career then you need to be sure you take care of yourself. Here are a few things I make sure to do now that I didn't necessarily do in the past.

Everyone will tell you something different about how to setup a git project and how to establish contribution policies. But there is a certain way I like to setup group projects in git (whether it's GitHub, BitBucket, or GitLab makes no difference) that works for me, and you are welcome to use it as well. Or not. It's okay if we disagree.

Last week I was traveling to a conference, and realized (due, in small part, to my "companions" on the flight home) that it might be worthwhile to write-up my personal etiquette rules for airline travel. Whether it's for work or leisure, there are a few rules that everyone should keep in mind.

I've been promising for some time to put together some reviews of books related to programming, AI, networking, and other topics I tend to talk about on this blog. Well, I've finally been able to sit down and read a book (based in no small part to the fact that I was on a plane last week).

If you spend enough time in technology, it becomes inevitable. Travel. It seems so glamorous at first. Your company is willing to spend what is sometimes non-trivial sums of money to send you off to some new location, where you will be their representative to the hundreds or thousands of other people attending the meeting or conference. Then the realization occurs: How do I make the most of my conference time?