Career on traviscj/blog

38 and Grateful

Tue, 03 Dec 2024 13:03:37 -0600

It’s been a while since I’ve written an update – 2.5y! – and a long time since I wrote very frequently. On top of all the crazy ways the world has changed in the last five years, a bunch has changed for me personally in the last five years as well, along a bunch of different axes.

I think part of the reason it’s been hard to post is wanting to avoid coming across as bragging about the high points of this journey and also not really wanting to admit some of the low points, but I feel I’ve had a lot on my mind that doesn’t really make sense in blog form without the greater context; I’ve decided that I’d rather just share a lot of what’s been going on in the hopes that some part of it is relevant to someone out there or gives them some fortitude for whatever low spot they’re going through or can learn something from it.

hype channels

Mon, 23 Aug 2021 21:20:31 -0500

When I was managing a small team, one of the coolest protips I came across was the idea of a “hype channel”. This builds on the idea of a “hype doc” by changing the medium: instead of writing into a document, you write blurbs on your own private Slack channel.

I’m not sure whether this would help anyone but me, but maybe it’ll help someone else drowning in Chrome tabs?

espps are free money

Wed, 02 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

ESPPs give employees an opportunity to buy the company stock at a discount. In both of the examples I’m aware of, the companies give a 15% discount on the LESSER of the price on the grant date and the price on the purchase date. The purchase dates are every six months, while the grants I’ve seen are either 12 or 24 months.

We can analyze this mathematically by breaking it into three cases. For concreteness, let’s look at ADBE for a grant date of 2019-01-02. The stock is trading at $224.27/share currently:

tradeoffs

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Life is (just) a series of tradeoffs.

DawnAnn “Mom” Johnson

I heard this so many times growing up that I think I actually stopped hearing it. But recently, I realized that it’s never been more pertinent than to my current day-to-day life as a software engineer.

The fundamental tradeoff we make on the Risk Systems team is trading off between

how much fraud we catch (and symmetrically, miss!)
how many false positives we incur to catch that much fraud

Those false positives running rampant can inhibit growth (in terms of interested customers) of the product we’re trying to protect, but letting too much fraud through can make a product too expensive (and even liable to be shut down!)

profitably wrong

Tue, 09 Jan 2018 08:00:00 +0000

I’ve come to realize that my career so far has been built on being “profitably wrong.” I think this is interesting because the usual approaches are being “profitably fast” (optimizing) or “profitably better” (improving), and most people think of any kind of wrongness as being a terrible thing. But sometimes the best way to optimize or improve is approximating!

The definitions of “profitably” has changed as I’ve worked on different things, as has the specific type of “wrongness”. A couple specific ways accepting “wrongness” have been profitable for me include:

things you don't learn in grad school

Mon, 01 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

oncall exists.
the data is never available how you need it.
unit tests matter.
pushing code after 3pm is risky if you’re not willing to work all night. (courtesy Paul Joos)

even the ceo doesn't get an office

Tue, 07 Nov 2017 07:01:25 +0000

Square is a fantastic place to work, and has been for my entire time here. One thing I’m not such a fan of, though, is the open office layout we have – and share with many other startups.

Somehow I have the distinct memory of thinking, “Wow, even the CEO doesn’t get an office here! That’s really cool!” I had an important realization today, though. It’s not that the CEO of companies with open offices don’t get an office – it’s that they don’t want one.

confident women are getting bypassed by overconfident men

Tue, 12 Sep 2017 04:44:13 +0000

Really interesting youtube talk: confident women are getting bypassed by overconfident men

square

Sat, 16 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I probably should have been working on my thesis, but I had a phone interview with Square. I wanted to write a bit of code to get myself “warmed up” but wanted it to be kinda fun. So I decided to write some code that drew a square.

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

int main() {

    cout << "+";
    for (int i=0; i<8; i++) cout << "-";
    cout << "+" << endl;

    for (int j=0; j<5; j++) {
        cout << "|";
        for (int i=0; i<8; i++)
            cout << " ";
        cout << "|";
        cout << endl;
    }

    cout << "+";
    for (int i=0; i<8; i++) cout << "-";
    cout << "+" << endl;

    return 0;
}

which yields a nice little square:

What could you possibly do with mathematics?

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, at a family gathering, I was confronted by the question many a college graduate is faced after telling someone I had majored in mathematics for my now-finished college degree: “But how are you going to make any money at that?”

Now, certainly it’s true: Graduate students don’t make that much. The average stipend for a grad student is roughly on par with (but still less than) unemployment checks. But that’s okay–in general, mathematicians know that they could make money other places, but they chose it anyways because of their love for the subject. Not that mathematicians make too bad of money anyway: The average in the US is about 50K, with associate professors making more than that. The particularly salary-inclined could pick up other credentials to become actuaries or work in hedge funds.

Graduate School Applications and Microsoft

Mon, 09 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I finally finished graduate school applications last weekend. I applied to University of Washington, University of North Carolina, Northwestern, University of Colorado, and University of Nevada. It’s a lot of work getting a bunch of applications out like that: I definitely underestimated it. Hopefully my personal statement measured up to the letters of recommendation that people wrote for me.

I also ended up having an interview with Microsoft that week, just to add a bit to the stress there. It actually went fairly well, though I haven’t heard back on the round-two interview yet. They said it would be a while though.