It’s hard to believe that I’ve been blogging now for over 12 years. I’ve written 100’s of posts, some short and some long. I’ve had my shares of ups and downs here but in the end I’m glad I stuck with it. It’s made me realize that blogging has led to my personal growth. Blogging has become a career! What’s happened is that I’ve been reposting and repopulating old posts from my archive. I took these posts down a few years ago thinking they were of no use, but now I realize I was wrong. Sure there were some cringe worthy type of posts back then, but I look at them now and smile. I’m so far removed from them now and I realize I so different now. ...

Q3 is over. It’s been over for a day already but it seems like it was a week ago. This has been one of the busiest Q3’s in my career as a Sales Engineer and I’m off to Montreal again. I’m visiting customers and turning some prospects into new customers. Q4 is going to be even crazier, but I enjoy this. The Sales life is strange when you think about it. You can’t make anyone buy anything they don’t want or need. Remember that scene at the end Wolf on Wall Street? Where Jordan Belfort comes out after being in prison and tells the audience to “sell me this pen.” He goes around to the audience and they’re completely clueless. ...

My posting activity has started to drop off again. This is partly due to a large workload and traveling schedule. I’m enjoying my work immensely but my blog is neglected as a result. A few weeks ago I even considered shutting this blog down because I feel like I’m like an “old man shouting at clouds.” I’ve come to realize that my skills are not in coding but in communication. ...

A few months ago I got a copy of Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich book because my niece recommended it. She’s quite a sharp cookie and is busying launching her couple’s travel lifestyle site with her husband. I love their videos about living in Germany, die videos sind wunderbar! This is a subtle hint to go check them out! While I like the idea of having a 4 Hour Workweek, I can’t seem to believe it. It sounds too easy to outsource things to cheaper labor and so forth. Working in the startup world I’ve learned that you have to do everything yourself. IF there’s something you don’t know, then you better learn it and FAST. I think before you can outsource anything, you need to really understand what that particular process is and figure out what parts can be automated (thanks Automate the Boring Stuff with Python ), what you should’nt give up, and whatever remains should be ‘outsourced’ to lower cost entity. ...

I just read this CNBC article that Ray Dalio is going long Gold. He believes that the markets are undergoing a paradigm shift and he might be right. The operative word is might. His fund’s been taking losses this year but appears to be recovering this July as gold perks up. Why is gold perking up? There’s a lot of economic and poltical uncertainity happening right now thanks to Trump, the Chinese Tariffs, and many other things. Plus, we just came out of an insane Real Estate crash 10 years ago and despite everyone saying it’s over, it still doesn’t feel over to me. ...

I always need to be learning. If I’m not pushing myself out of my comfort zone or just plain learning ‘cool shit,’ I just get bored and cranky. This is one of the reasons why I love working at H2O.ai because I’m pushed everyday. Just this past week I was pushed into learning more deeply NLP and coding Python, two topics I’m very interested in. Along the way I’ve learn how to use Git better and solve some interesting use cases. ...

I want to share my experiences as a Real Estate Investor (REI) and expert in the engineering field as a way to help novice real estate buyers. My wife and I made a lot of mistakes when we started buying properties. Now, after a few years we’ve gotten it down and are ruthless when evaluating a property. We’ve bought a house from auction, written short sales documents for banks, bird dogged, and researched flood prone properties as a way to get smarter about being real estate investors. ...

It’s been a long time since I wrote anything related to Real Estate (RE), especially about flipping houses. I heard on Bloomberg yesterday that the real estate flippers are exiting the market as fast as they can because the real estate market is starting to slow down. That’s interesting news because of my personal history with RE. I have been a real estate investor that wanted to be a flipper but got caught in 2007 slowdown. Instead of flipping, I became a landlord which has worked out OK over the years. ...

**Disclosure:** Some of the links below are affiliate links and at no additional cost to you, I’ll earn a commission. When you purchase a product or service using one of my affiliate links, the company compensates me, which helps me run this blog and keep my content free of charge to you. I recently picked up the late John Bogle’s book, “The Little Book of Common Sense Investing” and I plan on reading through it despite knowing the basic jist of it. Bogle was famous for creating the low cost index fund and the main thrust of his argument is keep expenses low and diversify into indexes. He started the Vanguard Mutual Funds and is the king of passive investing and many people got rich off his philosophy. ...

Last evening my colleague Navdeep Gill (@Navdeep_Gill_) posted a link to his latest talk titled “Interpretable Machine Learning with RSparkling.” Navdeep is part of our MLI team and has a wealth of experience to share about explaining black boxes with modern techniques like Shapley values and LIME. Machine Learning Interpretability (MLI) H2O has this awesome open source Big Data software called Sparkling Water. It’s similiar to RapidMiner’s Radoop but 1) open source, 2) more powerful, and 3) been tested by the masses. It’s stable and runs on many a Hadoop cluster with Spark. The neat thing about Sparkling Water is that you can take the H2O.ai Algorithms and push them down to the cluster to train on your ‘Big Data.’ There are quite a few powerful, fast, and accurate algorithms that H2O-3 has. H2o-3 is the current version of the open source set of algorithms and H2O.ai continues to develop this suite over time. Most recently they added [Isolation Forests](/isolation-forests- h2oai/)! ...