Right Now
I help boards and executives at growth-stage technology companies continue (or resume) rapid acceleration by advising them on improving their leadership capabilities, operations, and technology. While I specialize in executive advising on leadership and process, I can also dive into deep technical problems with Data Science or Software Engineering departments. Feel free to contact me directly to learn more.
I have a few tech projects in progress that will undoubtedly become blog posts. I’m working on an e-book about leadership in organizations, as well as a field manual for triaging performance and architecture in growth-stage startups. I sometimes write code for open-source projects like TinySite and CompressTest. I also work on ApplyByAPI, a tool that helps companies focus on quality over quantity in their tech hiring process.
Recent Publications
Command-line Tools can be 235x Faster than your Hadoop Cluster
Introduction As I was browsing the web and catching up on some sites I visit periodically, I found a cool article from Tom Hayden about using Amazon Elastic Map Reduce (EMR) and mrjob in order to compute some statistics on win/loss ratios for chess games he downloaded from the millionbase archive, and generally have fun with EMR. Since the data volume was only about 1.75GB containing around 2 million chess games, I was skeptical of using Hadoop for the task, but I can understand his goal of learning and having fun with mrjob and EMR. Since the problem is basically just to look at the result lines of each file and aggregate the different results, it seems ideally suited to stream processing with shell commands. I tried this out, and for the same amount of data I was able to use my laptop to get the results in about 12 seconds (processing speed of about 270MB/sec), while the Hadoop processing took about 26 minutes (processing speed of about 1.14MB/sec). ... read moreReal-Time Bidding, First and Second-Price Auctions, and Transparency
There has been some debate recently on AdExchanger about the benefits of first price versus second price auctions. Esco Strong, the Director of Display Marketplace Strategy for Microsoft Advertising wrote an article that basically said second price auctions didn’t work well for single unit RTB auctions and we should get rid of them: Comparatively, first-price auctions are competitions where there is no reduction in clearing price for the auction winner; instead, the winner simply acquires the good they have won by paying the price of their bid. The dynamics of this type of marketplace would become much more straightforward and predictable, enabling more parties to participate and experience stable results, as well as manage their businesses to a of set expectations that won’t require constant revision. ... read moreMAC Addresses, UDIDs, and Privacy
There has been quite a bit of fuss in the days since Apple started rejecting apps that make use of the UDID. The deprecation was announced months ago, but the rejection started without warning and was a surprise to some. Firms that had been planning for the change typically already had multiple secondary solutions in place, many of which rely on using the Media Access Control (MAC) address from the wireless network interface controller (wireless NIC) on the device. There have since been complaints that this is just as much of a privacy problem as using the UDID that Apple banned access to (keep in mind, they still have access to it), but these complaints demonstrate a lack of understanding on what a MAC address is, why it exists, and most notably the fact that it is transmitted in a plainly-readable form that can be viewed by every other device on any network to which you are connected. ... read moreUDID is Gone. So What?
The last week has seen quite a bit of commotion in the mobile world as Apple has started enforcing their long-awaited deprecation of the use of the UDID. Honestly, I’m not sure what all the fuss is about. This change was announced by Apple last summer, so everyone has had nearly a year to prepare for it. The general set of questions I’ve seen on the topic can be reduced to the following. ... read more