Making co-created experiences at Burning Man accessible — We have a once-a-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build something amazing together. This labor day weekend, for the first time in decades, tens of thousands of people will gather at Black Rock Desert without a sanctioned Burning Man event occurring. There will be art cars but no Department of Mutant Vehicles (DMV)…

An ephemeral intentional community outside of Taos, NM — Seventeen people. Three months. A property in the middle of nowhere. And a vision of testing what organizing a co-living space would be like, without the need to commit to buying a property or even signing a lease. What started as a vague idea to rent a small cabin close…

Are you building a data-driven web application that needs to serve data to your users with low latencies? Are you using MySQL, Postgres, or another traditional RDBMS as the backend for that web application? If so, you’re inevitably going to run into scalability issues as your dataset expands and your…

As somebody who has been lucky enough to get to travel abroad, I often find friends approaching me asking for general travel tips. I find most pieces of general travel advice to be too simplistic; they usually paint with broad brushstrokes and end up being irrelevant or even harmful. But…

Why the UCLA stats department needs to introduce a Python and SQL course to supplement our R classes — Update: We did it! I met with the Chair of the Statistics Department (Professor Mark Handcock) and he told me that (barring any unexpected hurdles) starting in Spring of 2018 the eminently qualified Miles Chen will likely be teaching a new course “Data Technologies” (STATS 131). This course will cover…

A review (with some spoilers) — I grew up reading the Big Three science fiction writers: Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein. As a young nerd, I loved that these science fiction writers emphasized the science part of science fiction, rather than the science fantasy we usually see today. Neal Stephenson harkens back to this truly scientific style…