Look! My Day Job startup launched a public website! You can now read some more about how we at Yowza are trying to make computers understand the world in 3D.

We believe 3D data will become ubiquitous, and revolutionize the world. Just like cameras in every pocket made images so important, the day that everyone will always carry a tiny high-resolution 3D scanner is not far. To take advantage of the imminent explosion of 3D data, we’re working today on giving technology the ability to make sense of the world around it in 3D.

Naturally, this is a huge undertaking. As a small startup (13 at the moment), we have to start with something and focus on it. For us, that first something is yowza-search. Our approach to search is shape-based, driven by the underlying geometry of indexed objects. This involves pretty high-level math, so we’re always on the lookout for bright people with strong background in math or physics. This also involves some serious compute-fu, scaling up the algorithmic shit to handle volumes of 3D data (did I say “cloud” and “big data”? 😉 ).

If any of it sounds interesting to you, consider joining us! 🙂

btw, the post image is a screenshot of a 3D model of myself (produced with a 3D scanner).

The Weekly Review is a recurring (so-far-)weekly summary, reviewing highlights from the last week.

Blog posts from the last week

1. Another app join the app highlights series. This time – Pushbullet.
2. Some more Mac training stuff – jumping from Finder to a terminal session in the same directory.
3. A first guest post on the blog! Gil Dollberg writes about his right-click hash Windows utility (and related Python-Windows-ASCII adventures).
4. The previous weekly review.

If you’ve been following my SCons series, be assured that I have more episodes coming up. In case you’re interested, I finished implementing and deploying most of the SCons enhancements I planned in DayJob, so I have all that to cover.

The best way to keep up with new posts is to follow the feed.

Web selections

Check out this guest post on the Google Cloud Platform blog, about the performance of Aerospike on GCE. Impressive shit.

Interesting – GCHQ abandoned work on a security primitive after they discovered a quantum attack against it. (via Schneiers blog)

Another post on Buffers default to transparency.

Interesting post on the futility of sweating over writing the perfect code, from the building real software blog. Just as with almost anything else, taking something to an extreme is usually a bad thing. When writing code, it’s important to find the right tradeoff between cowboy coding and unrealistic perfection. This tradeoff is never something absolute – it depends on many factors, like the nature of the task, its urgency, its expected shelf life, how critical it is (w.r.t safety, security, privacy, etc.), and also who’s coding it. Personally, I feel many programmers default too often to cowboy coding, which eventually produces so much broken stuff.

Lego released a new ad inspiring girls to “keep building”. Good thing that companies do things like that, to contrast stuff like Barbie…

LastPass and Dashlane both released new features around automatically changing passwords. It doesn’t really matter which password manager you choose – just use one!

Side project updates

At the beginning of this week I figured I want to track some metrics of my social pages (likes, followers, etc.), over time. Within a day, I got a quick-and-dirty Goole App Engine Python app that does that. Now, once an hour, I add a record with some social metrics. Expect a more detailed post on that soon 🙂 . Nothing else on the website project front.