Don't look at deadlines negatively! They are a useful tool to measure your performance + stimulate you to do more. You can learn a lot from a single deadline. Did you work too little or too much? Was the goal too ambitious or easy? Apply lessons to the future work. 😉 #MyMindset

Some thoughts today about what it's like to write a great book that never finds a wide audience. Did you know that the 4 books of the Shadow series have received a total of 7 starred reviews? That's kind of a big deal. And yet... no one's ever heard of it, really. 1/

We thought Wake of Vultures would land with a splash back in 2015. I went to SIBA, I went to sales conference and spoke w Mario Batali. The book did ok, but not great, was never in Target or the airport, despite amazing reviews. Why? NO IDEA. No one knows! Because publishing. 2/

When you're a new writer, you think that if you just write a great book and do everything you're told to, the book will find its wings and soar. You tick all the checkboxes and wait for the world to love your book. Sometimes, even w publisher support, it just doesn't happen. 3/

As usual, this real talk isn't meant to be a downer. It's meant to let you know that THIS IS NORMAL. Your book can get 3 starred reviews and a blurb from Pat Rothfuss and still not hit list or even gain a steady following. That doesn't make it any less great. 4/

I always say that publishing success = skill + time on task + publisher marketing + luck. And there is NOTHING you can do to up that element of luck. Timing, groundswell, one of the Obama kids reading your book on film. That's out of your hands. So you work on the next book. 5/

1. The major problem most startups face is marketing and the ability to carve out a niche, find and retain paying customers.

Even with a stellar developer team and a stellar product, your startup may not grow or survive without a great marketing and sales teams.

2. Start growing your audience before you’ve a product or an idea.

You should start promoting yourself and building your audience before you have a finished product or even before you have a great idea that you want to build.

3. Don’t wait to start building your audience after you’ve launched a product.

Most first-time developers actually ignore marketing.

They’re oblivious to the challenge of attracting people to take a look at something they’ve created.

4. At least until they see their first project crash and burn within hours of the launch.

There are so many times that I have seen developers spend countless hours building something, releasing it with no fanfare...

5. and only then trying to figure out how to promote it by asking marketing questions on Indie Hackers, Quora or Hacker News. Don’t make that mistake.

This post is pretty bizarre, but it manages to hit on so many false beliefs that I've seen hurt junior data scientists that it deserves some explicit

(1) The notion that R is well-suited to "building web applications" seems totally out of left field. I don't feel like most R loyalists think this is a good idea, but it's worth calling out that no normal company will be glad you wrote your entire web app in R.

(2) It is true that Python had some issues historically with the 2-to-3 transition, but it's not such a big deal these days. On the flip side, I have found interesting R code that doesn't run in modern R interpreters because of changes in core operations (e.g. assignment syntax).

(3) "Most of the time we only need a latest, working interpreter with the latest packages to run the code" -- this is where things get real and reveal some things that hurt data scientists. If this sentence is true, it's likely because you don't share code with coworkers.

(3) Really is a broader issue in data science: people only think of what they need to do their work if no one else existed and code was never maintained. Junior data scientists almost always operate on projects they start from scratch and don't have to maintain for long.

For those of you asking me if I bought my wework equity—I did not. But, not because I didn’t choose to buy it. Despite joining the company very early on, I was not offered options. Here’s a thread about what happened and my feelings about it now. /1

I joined wework in 2011 as the ~17th employee when we had 4 buildings. I was 23, naive, and didn’t know what equity or options were—I certainly didn’t know how much it could impact my financial future. When I, and the first hundred or so joined the team, /2

equity options weren’t a part of the deal and I thought nothing of it. As the company grew and we brought in more funding, the executive team decided it was time to allocate equity to its employees. It was mid-2013, about 4 years after the company started. /3

We had ~120 employees and I had been there for ~2 years. I don’t know much about what went on behind the scenes to determine who would get equity and how much, or quite frankly, why they did it at all. /4

In the process, they did a couple of things: First, the way in which they chose to allocate equity, to whom, how much, etc. was… interesting. I’ll get into that more soon. Second, for the people who were given equity options, wework made the choice *not* to backdate. /5