Come for the jokes, stay for the nonsense. This site contains my ramblings about programming, developer relations, stuff I’m working on, and the occasional machine learning/data mining pop culture mashup.
The developer frustration curve Imagine you’re a developer working at Opentech Corp tasked with adding payment support to your company’s product. You start by doing research on payment processing solutions in order to make a recommendation. You first try out payment processing company XYZ Processing because you’ve seen them around for a long time and you know it’s used by other companies...
For those of us that work in developer relations, we have likely experienced a situation like the following. “Let’s start with a round of introductions. Sean, why don’t you go first?”, says the organizer of the meeting. “Sure thing. Hey there, my name is Sean Falconer and I work in developer relations.” Room full of blank stares. Even in my day job, it’s common to interact with colleagues that...
I’ve told parts of this story in presentations in the past, but this is the detailed version of the key moments throughout my education and career that have led to where I am today. So, how exactly did a kid growing up in small town rural Canada find himself at one of the most influential technology companies in the world? Growing up in Canada’s Chocolate Town I grew up in a small town in Canada...
This post was written by Amanda Rabinowitz and me (Sean Falconer). Murmurs that the game of Survivor is more difficult for non-White contestants have been with the show since its early seasons. Survivor’s first Black winner, S4’s Vecepia Towrey, discussed issues of race with fellow contestant Sean Rector in a scene that was groundbreaking television in 2002 and remains resonant today. Vecepia and...
This post was written by Amanda Rabinowitz and me (Sean Falconer). We recently took a close look at the gender discrepancy in finding hidden immunity idols and its impact on women’s likelihood of winning Survivor. While the gender-gap in idol finding is stark and appears to coincide with poorer odds for female players, this is just one small piece of how gender can affect a complex social...
This post was co-authored by myself (Sean Falconer) and Amanda Rabinowitz. In Survivor’s most recent season, David vs Goliath, Angelina Keeley was the first contestant to call out on air the gender divide amongst idol finders. She stated that only 15% of idols are found by women. As many predicted, Angelina’s comment foreshadowed her own eventual idol find later in the game, making her only the...
I’m super late to the party this year, but I finally have some Survivor Season 37 rankings up! Below are rankings from Week 1 through Week 12 based on a machine learning approach I started back in Season 35. If this is your first time here, you can read all about the details of the project here. The quick and dirty version is that we use volunteers to collect data about player behaviors on...
It’s time for another season of Survivor and that means I’ll be back each week to discuss what machine learning has to stay about the potential winner of the season. If this is your first time here, you can read all about the details of the project here. The quick and dirty version is that we use volunteers to collect data about player behaviors on an episode by episode basis, then...
Recently Will Lanier from the Out Foundation contacted me because he had found an old blog post about my Crossfit Alerts project and was trying to do something similar for the upcoming 2018 Crossfit Open but for the LGBT+ community. He explained that he is involved in a project called OutWod to help bring together LGBT+ Crossfit athletes. They were going to have participants from this community...
In my last post, I discussed a large Survivor-related project that I’m involved in where we have volunteers code episodes of Survivor by the observed behaviors that player’s exhibit. You can read all about that project here. One of the potential applications of this crowdsourced data is using machine learning models to predict winners. All the nitty gritty details are in my original...
