Launching My Newsletter on Data, Engineering, and Career Building
A Little Bit of Slope Makes Up For A lot of Y-Intercept
Welcome to Slope Over Intercept, written by me, Robert Chang!
Background
Since 2015, I have been writing about data science, data engineering, and career building on Medium. My “writing career” started as a small experiment, and I wrote about topics such as:
… and a few more!
Five years in, I realized that the more that I write, the more ideas I have about these topics. When I learned about substack, I felt the same excitement when I first discover Medium, which led to this newsletter.
Why “Slope Over Intercept”?
One of the joys of starting something new is to come up with a meaningful yet personal name. I chose “Slope Over Intercept” as the name of my newsletter, inspired by Professor John Ousterhout and his famous talk “A Little Bit of Slope Makes Up For A Lot of Y-Intercept”.
In that talk, Professor Ousterhout argued that what you know now is far less important than your learning rate. If you have the right dedication, meta-habits, and feedback, you will end up in a much better place than where you started, and that’s ultimately what matters. This is also commonly known as the “Growth Mindset”.
I find this very inspiring and I have actually seen the benefit of having a growth mindset over and over again, not just for myself, but also my peers and colleagues.
How Is This Different From Your Medium Blogs?
My Medium posts are typically very long, and since they are usually kind of like my reflections, I only managed to publish 2-3 posts a year (It turns out that you don’t get systemic insights everyday).
Over time, friends on the internet asked me to share and write more frequently, and the perfectionist in me always feel hesitant. However, I realized that even when I am not writing Medium posts, I am constantly writing down my observations and insights on a regular basis, so I thought maybe it would be an interesting idea to share more regularly, so I decided to give this a try!
If you find some of my earlier blog posts useful, and you don’t mind getting my emails on a weekly basis, you might consider subscribing below, and tell your friends!