Try the untried, find smart people, write solid code.
Building a Camera to Capture Imagination: Early Passion and Failure Two years ago, I embarked on a journey to build a start-up based on the belief that camera software should be able to capture people’s thoughts, not just reality. In my previous post (nearly eighteen months ago), I argued that the term “camera app” was…
The “mobile camera app” is a misleading name for what it actually achieves. The misnomer is quite similar to the usage of “iPhone” when one refers to smartphones in general. Though the iPhones can make phone calls like any normal telephone, they are in truth more powerful and ever-improving personal computers that can be used…
There’s a well-known saying in the ML community: garbage in, garbage out. It means that if the model is trained using badly labeled data with lots of errors, the model will predict badly in return. A solid human labeling process provides high-quality labels to train the models with better quality. Those high-quality human labels can be used as ground truth for the related ML applications to train, calibrate, and evaluate against.
A career story that is hard to imagine.
The economy is gradually re-opening across the country. However, the virus is not going away any time soon. Tech companies will need a mixed strategy in the short term that carefully weighs which teams need to return to the office and which should stay remote. This period of extra caution might last a really long…
A complete review of bitcoin wallets and challenges to their increased popularity.
Lessons for leading from home.
I have run into several urgent situations this year, including major infra instability issues caused by fast product iteration, large cost reduction target with a short time window, and a major product sprint to deliver. Things started getting worse after some major product launches led us to accumulate a lot of technical debt in a…
Managing is hard. Managing during a downturn is much harder. During hard times, leaders often need to deliver bad news to the team while still being able to rally people around a vision. You may fail to deliver on previous promises, have to cancel ongoing projects, and sometimes even let people go. The year 2018…
It is promotion season again. I just spent the past month reviewing hundreds of promo packages from the engineering department, in addition to conducting more than 50 one-on-one conversations with my team on career growth. I have realized that many people care more about the prospect of a promotion than the growth itself. It is…