nodes & edges
Writings & resources that might change the way you see the world. Or at least the way you think.
Systems thinking¶
Bret Victor, especially the interactive essay Ladder of Abstraction
Machine Learning¶
Machine Learning Systems - an open source book (in progress as of May 2026), with several interactive exercises.
Feature Engineering A-Z by Emil Hvitfeldt covers a ton of feature engineering methods.
Understanding Deep Learning has a trove of references and a comprehensive set of notebook links covering material in the book.
Optimization¶
Gerald Brown's (NPS) papers on optimization tradecraft and formulating integer linear programs have proven extremely valuable.
Statistics¶
Hastie & Tibshirani - both Introduction to Statistical Learning and Elements of Statistical Learning are openly available.
The Bayes Rules! e-book by Johnson, Ott and Dogucu is available online.
Noam Ross has a nifty online course called GAMs in R. Generalized additive models provide some balance between linear models and black-box ML models, and are quite useful in instances where black-box models won't work.
Communication¶
Jean-luc Doumont provides clean direction on scientific and technical communication.
Bret Victor's Scientific Communication as Sequential Art
Presentation¶
Duarte's series of resources to level up in presenting and executive communication.
Garr Reynolds has been a big influence in how I communicate and present. He is one of the OG masters of presentation and storytelling. Your communication ability and stage presence will certainly grow by learning from him.
Visualization¶
Tufte of course.
Stephen Few has a ton of great examples as well. His book Show Me the Numbers is a terrific resource for simplifying and communicating essential information for clarity and communicating clearly.
Nadieh Bremer combines compelling visuals with information graphics in ways that evoke emotion. More recently, she has worked on generative art.
Cedric Scherer provides a ton of useful guides and shares his work.
Information is Beautiful has a far different visualization philosophy than Tufte or Few, but offers some intriguing concepts. They also share a number of datasets to explore.
Design¶
Alex Retinart's The Secret Law of Page Harmony