Last month I walked across Spain, east to west, following the historic Camino de Santiago, a historic pilgrimage route travelled by thousands of people a year. It was an experience.| Matthew Rocklin's Working Notes
Twitter is dead. Long live LinkedIn. Well, kinda. During Twitter’s golden age, I loved seeing people work in public. We shared half-formed ideas, debugged projects in real-time, and celebrated smal...| matthewrocklin.com
Consider these two statements:Dask Punk T-Shirts| Matthew Rocklin's Working Notes
The hard part about writing is thinking. When we speak with each other, our language just flows as our thoughts come. It’s easy and doesn’t require much forethought. Lips move at the speed of thoug...| matthewrocklin.com
People often ask me, “What is your tool for?” They want an answer like “AI” or “ETL” or “Training Models”. They want a clean and specific application for easy comparison. I, of course, do not give ...| matthewrocklin.com
Supporting a Python product is difficult because it’s hard to draw a line between your product and the rest of the ecosystem. This creates confusion, especially when it comes to triage and attribut...| matthewrocklin.com
Introduction: Recently I was chatting with an investor about the market and they asked: What do you see coming for the world of Data/Cloud/Compute Infrastructure? Is there some new dataframe librar...| matthewrocklin.com
Constructive conversation and venting are mostly distinguished by asking ourselves “Will these words help me achieve my goal?” If the answer is “no” then we’re probably venting. This post explores ...| matthewrocklin.com
This week I attended SatCamp, a small unconference focused on the Satellite / Earth Observation / Remote sensing industry held in Boulder Colorado.| Matthew Rocklin's Working Notes
In January 2018 I published a blogpost titled Pangeo: JupyterHub, Dask, and XArray on the Cloud, which introduced a new architecture for running scalable Python computations on the cloud using …| Matthew Rocklin's Working Notes
Every human being has a basic instinct to help each other out – Mark Watney, The Martian| Matthew Rocklin's Working Notes
We’re moving away from usage based pricing.Usage based pricing meme| Matthew Rocklin's Working Notes
Feedback is critical to performing good work as a team. Good feedback cultivates quality work and professional growth. Bad feedback degrades quality and erodes relationships. This article explains ...| matthewrocklin.com
We’re relaunching our enterprise sales effort after improving product-market fit. However, it’s an interesting challenge finding just the right person. This post goes into a bit of our history, wha...| matthewrocklin.com
Following up on a post on supporting users in open source this post lists some suggestions on how to ask a maintainer to help you with a problem. You don’t have to follow these suggestions. They ar...| matthewrocklin.com
Historically I mostly used Twitter to broadcast my work. However, Twitter today is less effective than it once was. What’s the best alternative? I recently published work on big data benchmarks and...| matthewrocklin.com
a story of shared abstractions Shannon Behrens recently published a brief post on the use of dictionaries and objects to store named data. He raised the following question: At what point do we tran...| matthewrocklin.com
This post argues for avoiding indirection in community code. We are taught to hide away details: I often see code where authors abstract away details by placing them in some external function. Here...| matthewrocklin.com
Software development is both a highly technical and a highly creative process. Programmers are reasonably proud of their abilities and experience, much in the same way that expert artists or artisa...| matthewrocklin.com
Engineer: Hey Boss, what should I know to more effectively sell our product?, Boss: Resist the urge to answer technical questions. I had this brief conversation years ago at an industry conference....| matthewrocklin.com
Tweets, like all writing, should respect the reader through brevity and structure. Caveats: First, I’m mostly talking about professional tweets, and less about pictures of family outings, cute cats...| matthewrocklin.com
What is a technical lead?: Tech lead is a role for senior engineers that provides some of the leverage of management, while avoiding most of the administrative burden. It’s a fun role. This post ta...| matthewrocklin.com
This is a fast blogpost please excuse the brevity. Summary: A fast review and merge cycle is incredibly valuable, When reviewing, consider highlighting which comments are obligatory because they st...| matthewrocklin.com
VC funded startups are weird. They (rightly) care more about valuation than about revenue. Valuation depends on revenue, but only on very certain kinds of revenue. The simplified version of this is...| matthewrocklin.com
We just returned from the annual SciPy conference full of energy as usual. This conference is unique because it includes core maintainers from most of the core Python data projects (Jupyter, Pandas...| matthewrocklin.com
I’ve intentionally shrunk Coiled from 40 to 20 people. This was painful, but we’re moving faster as a result. This article talks a little about the context around this. Common failure mode for star...| matthewrocklin.com
We often need to balance prioritization between user-facing work and internal or developer-facing work. It’s helpful to distinguish between these in conversations of prioritization and measuring su...| matthewrocklin.com
After building a successful open source project I then started a company and made many mistakes. Some folks on this path foolishly ask for my advice. This article encodes some of that advice. It is...| matthewrocklin.com
Most startups fail, and yet most CEOs project inevitable success. What gives? I can explain this in one of two ways: Most CEOs are crazy, Most CEOs are lying. It’s probably a little bit of both. CE...| matthewrocklin.com
I love remote work, but sometimes it sucks. Offsites can help. Motivation: Remote work empowers people to shape their work to fit their life. It also lets people focus on important work for long pe...| matthewrocklin.com
I cancelled all my regular meetings and logged off of Slack. It has made a huge difference. This article goes into why and how I made this change as well as the results on my mental health and perf...| matthewrocklin.com
We often optimize more for current users than future users. Stability often arises as a concern when proposing changes. I often hear statements like the following: We’re seeing some performance reg...| matthewrocklin.com
No one knows how to do your job. Look for answers from within, not without. In highly dynamic environments (tech, startups, zombie apocalypse) there is no historical set of rules that “just work”. ...| matthewrocklin.com
How we read and write shapes how we think Twitter chaos made us rethink our engagement on the web. Personally, I felt smarter and happier pre-Twitter. During this period I engaged by reading and wr...| matthewrocklin.com
Interviewing is hard. It’s also important to do well. A good/bad match can be transformative/terrible for both the company and the candidate. This article describes my current approach. It may be u...| matthewrocklin.com
Feedback is critical for alignment and growth, but really awkward. How should small, early stage companies handle performance reviews? This article gives some best practices from my perspective doi...| matthewrocklin.com
This article records my experience going through laser corrective eye surgery. Typically folks get LASIK. I got PRK/ASA instead, which is slightly more involved. This will go through the following ...| matthewrocklin.com
Making decisions is hard work, even if the decisions are low stakes. As proof consider the following questions from your ordinary life: “Where do we want to eat tonight?”, “Which toothpaste brand s...| matthewrocklin.com
Tests are important for community driven open source software. This post contains brief reasons why you should test your code, particularly if you submit changes to existing open source projects. W...| matthewrocklin.com
honesty is hard This work is supported by Continuum Analytics the XDATA Program and the Data Driven Discovery Initiative from the Moore Foundation. Summary: Performing benchmarks to compare softwar...| matthewrocklin.com
The best way you can contribute to an open source project is to remove lines of code from it. We should endeavor to write code that a novice programmer can easily understand without explanation or ...| matthewrocklin.com
I avoid interacting on Slack, especially for technical conversations around open source software. Instead, I encourage colleagues to have technical and design conversations on GitHub, or some other...| matthewrocklin.com
What are the expectations and best practices for maintainers of open source software libraries? How can we do this better? This post frames the discussion and then follows with best practices based...| matthewrocklin.com
I encourage my colleagues to write blogposts more frequently. This is for a few reasons: It informs your broader community what you’re up to, and allows that community to communicate back to you qu...| matthewrocklin.com
Speaking truth is easy. Getting people to listen is hard. Summary: This post talks about communicating effectively to a short attention span. It lays out practical writing style advice to respect t...| matthewrocklin.com
Common open source software (OSS) / venture capital (VC) metrics are flawed. This surprises no one; metrics are hard. Since starting a company around a pre-existing community OSS project, Dask, I’v...| matthewrocklin.com
HD is the new tall How we present ourselves has unreasonable effectiveness on how our message is perceived. Aesthetic qualities can, unfairly, be translated into a greater sense of authority. In th...| matthewrocklin.com
Where are we on product and GTM? What are some open questions and what should we do to improve? This article gives a snapshot of where Coiled (Dask company) is on product development and sales and ...| matthewrocklin.com