Latest Updates

2023-04-18

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Links

  • Where to set the standard by Sarah Guo is an exhortation to move quickly. The biggest advantage startups have when trying to break into existing markets is the agility that larger, more established companies can not match. This short essay urges you to embrace that advantage, and not worry about high standards scaring people away. High performers embrace high standards.
  • Excuse me, is there a problem? by Jason Cohen is a great overview of analyzing the market for your potential startup. But the big contribution from this article is a quantitative framework for rating your business idea and classifying it as appropriate for high-growth, VC-funded scale up, a medium-growth bootstrapped business, or just something not worth pursuing.

2023-04-16

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Yesterday I wrote some notes on PostgreSQL Row Level Security and it ended up on HN. It got onto the front page, which resulted in this crazy graph on my Plausible stats.

plausible-hn-spike.png

If this happens more regularly I'll have to upgrade my plan! 😆

2023-04-14

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Yesterday I set up a custom command bar for Neovim, and I also wrote up some details on how to do it for yourself: Creating a Custom Command Bar in Neovim

vim-command-bar.png

Links

  • Building LLM Applications for Production is a bit light on the actual topic, but that's forgivable since the community as a whole is still figuring out best practices for using LLMs in production. Regardless, it is a good overview of the LLM landscape and various tools and methods around it. On the title topic, I did enjoy the discussion of unit testing.
  • One thing I’ve also found useful is to ask models to give examples for which it would give a certain label. For example, I can ask the model to give me examples of texts for which it’d give a score of 4. Then I’d input these examples into the LLM to see if it’ll indeed output 4.
  • Scott Alexander's review of a book about IRBs is a good read if you're interested in research practices and process. But this quote was too jaw-dropping to miss.
  • maybe it was unethical to do RCTs on ventilator settings at all. He asked whether they might be able to give every patient the right setting while still doing the study. The study team tried to explain to him that they didn’t know which was the right setting, that was why they had to do the study. He wouldn’t budge.

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About Me

Work

I'm a co-founder of Carevoyance (acquired by H1 Insights), a sales acceleration tool that analyzes healthcare data and enables healthcare sellers to zero in on their best prospects and generate custom reports and insights with just a few clicks.

I spend most of my time there creating new data analyses, working on the backend API and database systems, and developing tooling to research data anomalies and automate repetitive tasks. Recently I've been active on the front-end too, and have been enjoying the Svelte framework.

In the past I worked almost exclusively in C++ and various assembly languages. Now that I'm more in the web ecosystem, I'm mostly writing Javascript for work, but I'm using Rust more and more as well.

Before starting my own venture, I interfaced with advanced network switching chips at Arista Networks and worked on JTAG hardware debuggers and embedded operating systems at Green Hills Software. Running a small startup feels very different from working at these companies, and it has its ups and downs, but I love it.

Life

I usually have some sort of side project going on, and my most recent obsession is Ergo, a low-code workflow orchestrator that is still in early stages, but coming along well.

Sometimes I wish I could code all day and night, but when not hacking on something or spending time with my family, I enjoy good coffee, nature photography, reading nonfiction and sci-fi, and improving my nascent design and UX skills. I'm also active in my church and run the sound board there every few weeks.

Where to find me

Twitter is probably the best way to contact me, and I'm trying out Mastodon as well. You can also email me at daniel at this domain or find me on Github.

About this site

The website is written using SvelteKit, Tailwind, and hosted on Vercel. Icons sourced from the Refactoring UI icon set and iconmonstr.

The prose content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The code can be viewed on Github. The underlying code as well as all code examples are licensed under the MIT license.