Zero to One

What important truth do very few people agree with you on?  
 
~Peter Thiel’s contrarian question

Peter Thiel is a Silicon Valley billionaire, co-founder of multiple successful startups (including PayPal), and a venture capitalist. In those roles, Thiel asks the above contrarian question while interviewing job candidates.

The question is simple, but difficult to answer because it requires the respondent to express an unpopular opinion. As observed in the book Zero to One, courage is less common than genius.

Sidecar: iPad as a Second Display

Apple’s latest laptop operating system, macOS Catalina, includes a feature that took me by surprise: Sidecar. Let’s say that you’re working in a coffee shop and you need additional screen real estate. Sidecar will let your iPad function as a second display.

Open Source in North Carolina

Over 5,000 tech enthusiasts attended the All Things Open conference in Raleigh, NC this week. The topics were rich: AI, IoT, devops, UXD, developer tools, burn-out, technical leadership… what an eclectic collection to choose from!

Parallelism, Raspberry Pi, and Jetson Nano at IndyCode()

Exciting things are happening in the world of parallel programming. The organizers of IndyCode() invited me to share some updates with their audience this year. Thank you Ken Versaw, Lois Versaw, and the entire team of organizers for having me on stage.

Nvidia GPU Technology Conference 2019

What do people do when they have a terabyte of data coming in every day? They ignore it, because they know there’s another terabyte coming in tomorrow. Pretty soon, they’ll be infinitely behind!
~Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia

The best humor contains a kernel of truth. Jensen Huang shared the above observation during his keynote at Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference last week in San Jose, CA. The 9,000-person audience laughed knowingly!

Every industry has been hit by a tsunami of data, a tsunami offering advantages and challenges. Advantage: The volume of data means we can quantify our work and our decisions like never before. The challenge: Turning data into actionable information takes work. GTC 2019 was a gathering for people exploring ways to meet the challenge. This article offers a summary of the event.