Things I keep pointing people to
This page will grow slowly. For now it’s a small set of books, tools, and links that shape how I work.
- The Courage to be Disliked
This book by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga is a transformative exploration of Adlerian psychology, presented as an engaging dialogue between a cynical young man and a wise philosopher. The narrative challenges conventional views on trauma and personality, arguing that we are not defined by our past experiences but by the meanings we choose to give them. By stripping away the need for external validation, the authors provide a roadmap for finding freedom, simplifying life, and achieving a profound sense of self-acceptance.
- Marimo - Next generation Python Notebook
Marimo is a reactive Python notebook that solves many of the traditional issues found in Jupyter. Some of it's key strengths include reactive execution, reproducibility with consistency, executability as an App, and it's easy to include UI elements.
- Neural Network Playground: Interactive Deep Learning
A powerful, browser-based visualizer that lets you "tinker" with a live neural network. You can adjust hidden layers, learning rates, and activation functions in real-time to see exactly how a model learns to classify complex data patterns without writing a single line of code.
- Lightcone Podcast (by Y Combinator)
This podcast provides a "behind-the-scenes" look at the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem. The hosts leverage their experience as YC partners to discuss emerging trends—with a heavy focus on the current AI revolution—offering advice on everything from pivoting and fundraising to building "what people want" in an era of rapidly evolving technology.
- Awesome Python: The Ultimate Dev Toolbox
Curated, opinionated list of the best Python frameworks, libraries, software, and resources. Much like other "awesome" lists, this is an indispensable resource if you are looking for specialized tools—ranging from AI and data science to web development and security—to power your work and next build.
- The Transformer Revolution: Attention Is All You Need
This seminal 2017 paper by Google researchers introduced the Transformer architecture, effectively ending the reign of RNNs and LSTMs in NLP. By replacing recurrence with a pure "self-attention" mechanism, the authors paved the way for massive parallelization and the birth of modern LLMs like GPT and BERT. It is quite literally the foundation of the current AI era.