I joined Stripe a full year ago. It was my first foray into full-time employment, which meant that there were many ways to stumble and many things to learn.
I spent last summer interning at the New York Times on the Interactive News Team. It's a really fantastic group of people who build tools for the newsroom.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it. —Upton Sinclair
The environment and inequality are closely intertwined. In Flint, Michigan, where thousands of residents were exposed to highly dangerous levels of lead, the majority of residents are black and many are low-income. Third grade reading scores in Flint have dropped by a startling 75% in the past year.
If you have a job that's computationally intensive, it wouldn't be a great idea to keep a user waiting; rather, it's best to do that in the background. Task queues are great tools that allow for async processing, outside of an HTTP request.
I'm currently on winter holiday in China, which gives me ample opportunity to get lost in a good book— at the moment, it's The Man Who Knew by Sebastian Mallaby, a riveting biography of Alan Greenspan.
My literary society hosts a Fireside Poetry event every semester— like an open mic, but for poetry. I used to never really care much for the form, preferring prose instead, but there's something so beautiful and captivating and sacred about listening to people read poetry aloud.
RecordRTC is a library that allows for client-side recording, using WebRTC. It's a fantastic tool (created and well-maintained by Muaz Khan) that I've been integrating into a project at the Media Lab.