The Interview Advice No One Gives You

What good does it do to practice coding problems for weeks if your mind goes blank in an interview room? How can you show your “best self” if you’re too afraid to let it out? Everyone says to be wary of the recruiters, but what if you weren’t?

Remembering what you Read: Zettelkasten vs P.A.R.A.

I spent over a year researching better ways to take notes to remember what I read. Here's what I found.

Quickly Building Products for ACTUAL Customers

Features that seem critical may not actually be that important. Experiment to see what your *actual* customers are demanding, and focus 100% on that.

The Truth about VPC Security Controls

GCP's VPC Service Controls protection is often described as a virtual firewall for your GCP projects. That metaphor quickly breaks down if you're trying to actually add it to your GCP projects. I learned that the hard way.

So you want to do Deep Work?

In this information era where all mechanical tasks are being automated, in order to be successful you need to be able to do what machines cannot: be creative. And creativity is something you generate on demand through Deep Work

How to setup a Free Custom Domain Email Address

I recently discovered that it's possible to combine any domain that you own with your Gmail account and a free MailGun account to get a free custom domain email address! Here's how:

How to Create Customized Deep Learning Containers

Ever find yourself needing to install the same packages on all your deep learning notebooks? Or maybe wishing you could send your exact setup to someone else who could run your notebook? I explore how you can create a custom Docker Container to contain your exact desired Deep Learning environment. Specifically, I'll cover creating Tensorflow with GPU support for R, but you can use these steps for any customization you want

How to Use GPUs with R in Jupyter Lab

Setting up R to use GPUs can be a pain, but it doesn't have to be. Have you ever tried installing drivers for your Nvidia GPU? The first time I tried it I spent the better half of an afternoon trying to get that done. Though once I realized that I had to also recompile a lot of the software I wanted to actually use those GPUs, I was ready to give up.

The Essential Git Cheat Sheet

Quick cheat sheet of commonly used git commands that I’d otherwise have to keep Googling to remember

Use Virtual Environments Inside Jupyter Notebooks & Jupter Lab [Best Practices]

Bring the best practices established by the Python community to your Jupyter Notebooks. You can add virtual environments to Jupyter Lab, giving each notebook it's own environment. This post goes into detail explaining exactly how you can add virtual environments to your own notebooks on Google Cloud's AI Platform Notebooks

Authenticating AI Platform Notebooks against BigQuery in Python

How to authenticate with BigQuery (in Python) when using AI Platform Notebooks

Be Creative by Asking Better Questions

Find Innovative Business Ideas by Asking Questions. Develop better critical thinking and problem solving skills, and fight information overload. My reading notes from the book "A More Beautiful Question" by Warren Berger

So Good They Can't Ignore You - Key Ideas

How to have a career you enjoy and traps to avoid

Using BigRQuery on GCP AI Platform Notebooks

When you're using Jupyter Notebooks with R, authenticating with BigQuery can be tricky. Here's how to do it.

Five Tactics for Tackling Complex Problems at Work

Albert Einstein once said “The definition of genius is taking the complex and making it simple.” But how can someone actually do that? Below are some tactics I've used that can make a big difference.

5 Habits for Better Learning

These mental habits were developed to teach school children how to think critically and become problems solvers. It’s a valuable skill for adults to learn as well.

When presented with any new information think about:

1. Evidence: Why do you think this information is true or false? What should count? What do you think you know and why?
2. Viewpoints: How would this look from other perspectives? How would other people or companies think about this differently?
3. Connections: Noticing any patterns? Have you seen something like this before?
4. Conjecture: What if something about this was different? How would that impact things?
5. Relevance: Why does this matter?

(Source: A More Beautiful Question by Warren Berger)

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Salary Negotiation Tips for Your New Job Offer

Tips for negotiating your salary once you get a job offer

How to: Redirect the default *.azurewebsites.net domain to your custom domain on Azure Web Apps

Here's how you can block people from using your default *.azurewebsites.net domain. Do this after you've added a custom domain name.

Let customers use Facebook authentication to log into your ASP.NET Core site

How to setup Facebook authentication in a way that we get access to the person's basic information and their email address when they log in.

Deploy statically generated sites to Azure Web Apps

There are a lot of awesome static site generators out there. It’s not always easy to figure out how to setup continuous deployment for them though. This post will describe how to deploy a statically generated site using yeoman angular to Azure Web Apps, but these steps can be applied to deploy any statically generated site to Azure Web Apps.