It’s been a while since I’ve written anything, so figured a link dump of what I’ve been enjoying would be a good way to get back on track. We’ll see if it works. The links will encompass articles, podcasts, and whatever else merits being passed along.

Podcasts / Videos

• Wayfarer’s Guide to World-Building: After listening to N.K. Jemisin talk about world building with Ezra Klein, I decided to look for more resources on the topic. I’ve always loved fantasy and sci-fi novels, and coming up with my own world has long been a fantasy of its own. I found this podcast by Mythos & Ink, an independent SFF publisher in Canada, and have really enjoyed it so far. Their approach is more through examples than their own work, but they provide questions to ask yourself about each topic and make it fun.
• Ottobot and Playing Ottoneu: I am diving even deeper on fantasy baseball this year and started listening to Ottobot, Ottoneu’s official podcast, as well as Playing Ottoneu, a fancast by a member of one of my leagues. It’s a 20 team Ottoneu league - the only of its kind - and the podcast’s host, Miguel, is one of the other managers in the league. It’s a super fun podcast that typically includes some personal stories of fandom and his fantasy teams, followed by an interview with someone else in the 20 team league about their own journey and the unique challenges of the league. Spoiler alert - my brother and I will be on an upcoming episode!
• SLICED: Full disclosure, I haven’t watched this yet, but it just seems super cool and my friend Canzhi won the first episode!
• Clubhouse Conversations: Pat Ellington’s series talking to Black people in Minor and Major League Baseball. So far I’ve only listened to his interview with DJ Gladney in the White Sox organization, but it’s really cool seeing the spotlight on these young players.

Blogs

A lot of these are Substack blogs - they’re easy to read and there’s a lot of great content.

• The One with all the Flaneury: I love the idea of flâneurs, nonchalantly strolling through a city and stopping at whatever store or park or bakery catches their eye. It’s something I try to do from time to time. Bonus - Elle Griffin’s Substack has some neat stuff about writing - how tough it is to make money, links to other Substack writers, etc.
• The Pandemic is Heightening Diet Culture for Men: Fascinating piece on how men approach dieting differently, how it masquerades as other terms, and how the pandemic affected it. Recommend it to help make some implicit weight and diet stuff explicit.
• Using PostgreSQL as a Data Warehouse: I’ve been looking more into the data engineering side of data and am using PostgreSQL as the database for my D3 hoops project, so this was an interesting read on how to optimize it as a warehouse.
• What Should We Learn from the Short-lived Career of Data Scientists?: Super interesting post on how different the cultures and terminology are in data and machine learning compared to traditional software engineering, and how aspects of data and ML will be merged back into how software engineering works.
• Refinement Culture: I haven’t actually read part 2, but this piece is all about how subgenres of culture are converging on the same aesthetics or designs. It reminded me a lot of Vicki Boykis’s post on how some people in San Francisco influence global ideas of the same things.
• Programming and Writing: This one really struck a chord with me since one of this year’s goals was writing for 30 minutes every day. But writing English is very different from writing code. If you look at my contribution graph on Github, then it looks like I’ve been fairly successful. But looking at my blog post history, the results are less encouraging. It’s tough to balance both writing code and writing non-code, and it was cool seeing someone else put that into words.
• The Cataract of Lodore: I just finished Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons and this poem was mentioned in it. It’s just a fun poem that’s Seuss-ian with the lighthearted rhymes.
• Pesticides are Killing the World’s Soils: Pesticides are bad for soil - surprise!! And our current testing methods in the US are woefully inadequate, so we can’t effectively capture how pesticides are impacting biodiversity in soils.
• The Modern Trap of Turning Hobbies into Hustles: Another one that really vibed with me. I’ve been working on more side projects this year and have thought about how to monetize them, but maybe that is the wrong approach. I love having hobbies and trying new things, and turning that into work could force me to stick to one thing even if I want to drop it for whatever reason.
• Javascript and the next decade of data programming: Interesting piece from Ben Schmidt, who has a Python / R background, on how Javascript is well positioned for handling data stuff over the next decade. I’m definitely going to follow up and see what stats, data, and ML packages exist in Javascript since this post focused more on how data can be visualized and explored rather than hard analysis.
• Tools for Tiny Teams: Neat post on how to handle being a small analytics / data team and what tools can help you work on the stuff that will get you off the ground and push the org forward. I’m working on a couple of projects that are either solo or small teams, so this was particularly relevant to me right now.