Eric J Ma's Website

Did you forget to set an environment variable before launching Jupyter? Today, I learned how you can rescue that situation easily.

Today I learned that it's possible to create a Desktop app that uses Flask (and hence HTML/CSS/JS) to render the front-end. Read on to see what packages are involved.

Today I learned that Canada exports education.

Today I learned about the definition of the term "probability simplex". Here's what it is.

Nudges are fascinating, useful, and in some cases, potentially life-saving. I recently read a paper that talked about life-saving nudges and reflected on what made these nudges _effective_.

I learned a new thing: how to enable Netlify site preview URLs to be commented back on a PR thread! A story about how the collective intellect of the world is such a wonderful resource to query.

Recently, I saw [Datasette](https://datasette.io) resurface on my Twitter feed, and I started doing a deep dive into it once again. The work that [Simon Willison](https://simonwillison.net), author of Datasette, has done -- it is amazing! Here's what I learned test-driving it once again.

Once in a while, I make it a practice to hack on my resume. The goal isn't explicitly to keep it relevant, though. Instead, I use it as an excuse to practice CSS. The result is something I'm pretty pleased with. Come read about how I did it!

I've been working on revamping the `nxviz` API to much more closely align with the grammar of graphics' principles and other data visualization best practices. Come check out the ideas backing the API revamp!

What are phony targets in Makefiles? Or have you not heard of them before? Here's a short post documenting a minimal example of what phony targets are.