I’ve written a couple of job descriptions recently for a program manager role my team is hiring for. Here’s a random extract from the posting: “Ability to lead change and drive own initiatives…“ “Eye for design…“ “Cross-team skills…“ I hate to break it to you, but even if you do all these things, you’re not [...]
I picked up a copy of Wes McKinney’s excellent Python for Data Analysis a few days ago. The book recommends IPython, NumPy and matplotlib, which are usually easy enough to install on Linux. Surprisingly, I spent the better part of the morning getting all of these packages to install and work correctly on Mac OS [...]
I have a hypothesis – the average middle-class American is being required to actively manage more and more aspects of his life in order to survive in the post-Recession economy. By active management, I mean requiring conscious thought, effort and learning. As a result, what used to be a behavioral pattern among the rich and [...]
Olga Ivanova recently shared a great HBS case study on Amazon Web Services with me. The study chronicles the rise of AWS from a back-office infrastructure provider to it’s current incarnation. Here are some key lessons I took away from this case study: Successful businesses listen to internal and external customers. In this case, Amazon [...]
I love Sublime Text 2 – it has replaced Visual Studio and even the venerable TextMate for Python hacking. Sublime doesn’t have great support for debugging – you have to add breakpoints using code the old-fashioned way. For example, if you have some Python code: x = 5 x = x + 1 and you [...]
I’m happy to announce that we are going to ship a new usage details CSV (comma-separated values) format in the next two weeks. This blog post is meant to give a heads up to those of you who use this file in your scripts. First, here’s why we are making changes to the format: Difficult [...]
I’m happy to announce that Windows Azure has release another great set of features. Here are they, are in no particular order: Amazing (up to 32%) discounts on Azure with new Prepaid Plans. Steven Martin covers the plans really well in his “Taking the fear out of commitment” blog post, but here’s the gist: by [...]
I’m happy to announce that you can now login to and purchase Windows Azure using “organizational accounts”. Up until today, users have only been able to login using their Microsoft account (formerly Windows Live ID) For corporations, organizational accounts have several key benefits: Employees do not have to sign in with ‘personal’ accounts e.g. with [...]
The Azure Billing team is proud to announce another set of great features, fresh on the heels of our big June 7 launch: 1. As of today, you can purchase Azure in several new countries: Russia, Uruguay, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Turkey and Ukraine. 2. We have localized our Account Portal in Turkish and Polish: Hoş Geldiniz [...]
The Azure billing team is proud to announce awesome new features. We have some incredibly cool stuff coming down the line, so think of this as a teaser! 1. Signup for Preview Features The Azure team is working on tons of new features, and we will be giving users early access to them before they [...]