November 2022 - New Beginnings 🎄

Hey, everyone!

I know, I know... This one came 3 days late. It's been a bit of a month. I got promoted at work, things have been a bit choppy with my grandmother's health, and I had a primary oncall shift this week at work that was super hectic.

We enjoy the holidays, but they're over too soon because we get distracted with work, projects, or other things that seem more important to us at the time.

Then, when they're over, we look back and realize that we should have been paying attention to what really matters in the longer term of our lives. Our family and friends (and their happiness and health) should be a priority during this time of the year.

I hope that you get a chance to slow down a bit (even if it's just for a day) and relax. I hope you stay safe this holiday season.

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Nathan ☕️

NOTE: This is the last email I'll be sending from Revue, as I'm migrating to Substack for my newsletters. The layout will look a little different next time, but you don't need to do anything other than stay subscribed. My next email will come right after New Year's Eve. Talk soon!

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Articles/News

Why Twitter Didn't Go Down

This article breaks down exactly how and why Twitter was able to lay off so many of its staff and is still functional at this time. In many cases, it's mostly because the staff (who were good at their jobs) that worked there for so long invested a lot of time and effort to build a highly available and redundant system architecture.

Code

Advent of Code

Advent of Code (which, as time of this writing, is already running for this month) is a great way to jump into some daily coding challenges in the month of December.

FastAI Deep Learning & Neural Networks Course

I've emailed about this before, but the FastAI course on Practical Deep Learning for Coders is phenomenal. I restarted it after taking a break during crunch time at work, and I feel like I've been learning more the second time through.

The Problem with Metrics

While this article is focused on AI, it applies to many other disciplines as well; metrics are so important, but they're not everything. Always using them as a north star can even be dangerous.

The Dangers of Overfitting

This article breaks down how overfitting your modal to test data can end up creating an AI model that doesn't produce the results you want in the real world.

Python for Data Analysis

This is a full book from McKinney on using Python and its libraries for performing data analysis. It comes well recommended from the teacher of the FastAI course I listed up above.

Games

Azul: Stained Glass (board game)

Some of you might remember the first version of Azul that I posted here months ago. Well, my parents bought the sequel for me for my birthday last month and it's been really great. It uses the same basic concept while warping your understanding of it in different ways by "hanging stained glass" instead of tiling.

Music

Good Old War

I have to confess that I didn't discover this band this month. I first listened to them in college, but I returned this fall to listen to them again; they have a bunch of great albums and are a perfect blend of acoustic, indie, and a bit of folk (Apple Music and Spotify).

Videos

The Intern (movie)

The premise of this movie is that a retired man (Robert De Niro) decided he misses working after his wife dies and becomes an intern for a tech company and its CEO (Anne Hathaway). This movie has a lot of great lessons about life and how to treat others.

About Time (movie)

I was absolutely stunned by how good and heartfelt this movie was. It's a romance, time travel, and father-son story all rolled into one. You will probably cry watching it.