Eric J Ma's Website

On a recent vacation, since we've got nowhere to go, I decided to re-examine how I made notes in my personal and professional lives. The result is a lot of lessons learned into effective notetaking, and me building yet another thing. Curious to see what I learned? Read on!

How do you prevent a headless Linux machine from going to sleep/suspend? I recently learned how to do so :).

Enrico Fermi had a unique way of thinking that I think dovetails nicely with constructing principled priors. Curious? Read on!

I recently arrived at an epiphany: Delivering talks on a topic is an important way to prepare for writing a paper. Intrigued? Read on to learn why.

I found a new free and open source tool for moving data between computers in a secure and fast fashion, called croc. I highly recommend it! Come read on to learn more.

How do you write clean Python code in the year 2020? Check out this latest essay I wrote. Cross-posted from my essays collection.

I recently figured out how to dynamically insert a Binder badge into HTML pages built from Jupyter notebooks, so that users can one-click directly open a Jupyter notebook in the correct conda environment without needing to navigate or build an environment from scratch. Come see how I figured this out!

If df.iterrows() is slow, what then is the alternative? Read on to figure out how to make looping over dataframes 1000X faster :).

I test-drove the Python package pandera this month, and I like its usage paradigm. Come read on to learn how you can incorporate pandera into your workflow!

Why do software skills matter for data scientists? We might have heard that it matters for our workflow, but what about for organizing knowledge? In this essay, I argue that practicing good software skills has those benefits and more.