Joel Grus

Year In Review 2025

One thing that I've gotten pretty interested in recently is "agent engineering" or "agentic architectures" or "agentic system design" (I'm not sure there's a canonical name for it).

The other day I ran across a blog post on how to build a coding agent.

As I started to think about my meme-generating agent, I figured that I might want to allow it to ask clarifying questions.

As my next project, I thought it would be fun to use AI to generate memes.

"How do you know if someone does Crossfit?"

A few years ago we went on an Alaska cruise, and we sprung for a cabin in the private/exclusive part of the ship (which is the way to go!)

A long long time ago I took a graduate course in Econometrics.

I have started several novels, although I have never finished one.

The world is getting into Vibe Coding, so I will too.

A while back I had the idea that 9yo and I would program a bunch of simple games together and she'd get interested in coding.

Next @joelgrus’ book: “100 ways of writing fizz buzz in Python” — Rocco Meli ⌬ (@RoccoMeli) June 13, 2019 I've been quarantined for the last several months for reasons that are too boring to go into, which somehow gave me a lot more time to write.

I am thrilled to announce that the second edition of Data Science from Scratch is now available!

I give talks, and this fall my talk has been to live code a deep learning library (and use the resulting library to solve Fizz Buzz).

interviewer: Welcome, can I get you coffee or anything?

Long-time readers may recall that last year I wrote a blog post about the mathematics of Spot It.

When I worked at Farecast we had a giant TV in the lobby, and up on that TV was an image of a globe, and on that globe were animated paths that (as far as you know) corresponded to flight searches that people were doing on the site.

(part 1, part 2) OK, so last time we built a web service that responds to GET requests with random (bogus) elementary school science questions.

(part 1, part 3) Last time we collected and processed the data for generating stupid fake elementary school science questions and answers.

(part 2, part 3) As I'm not working right now* , I have a surfeit of time to hack on stupid things.

The readers of my book have been clamoring for an index of functions, so that -- for example -- when someone sees me use vector_mean on page 200 they can easily figure out where to find its definition.

[The fourth in an (at least) 6-part series, all code on GitHub as always.]

[The third in an (at least) 6-part series, all code on GitHub as always.]

[The second in an (at least) 6-part series, all code on GitHub as always.]

[The first in an (at least) 6-part series, all code on GitHub as always.]

(This is a blog post version of my PyData Seattle talk, slides and code at the link.)

If you've ever done a tech interview, you're probably familiar with the Fibonacci sequence: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, .... where each number is the sum of the previous two.

Last weekend we went to a party where one of the other attendees brought Spot It!

I am super-excited to announce that the book I've been working on for more than the last year, Data Science from Scratch: First Principles with Python is finally available!

2014 was a crazy year, mostly because I took on two very large projects either of which would have made for a pretty crazy year. 1.

(You might want to read Part 1 first.)

Before I was a parent I never gave much thought to children's clothing, other than to covet a few of the baby shirts at T-Shirt Hell.