Seth Black
Professional Nerd
When asked
what I do for a living
my family has come up with probably
the best description of me:
"He's a professional nerd."
What does that mean, though?
I love to nerd-out on lots of things, and I get to do that for a
living!
Specifically, I focus on Artificial
Intelligence, Computer Science, my comic, and
startups.
Articles & Essays
A Third AI Future
The horrifying - yet eerily familiar - dystopia full of murder-bots and all-knowing robot overlords; and the oh-so-close utopia featuring flying cars and droid servants darting around: these futures have been part of our collective imagination for over a century now. As much as I love Sci-Fi, I am compelled to promote a less intense and much more practical future. Read On »
How to Conduct Consistent Engineering Interviews
After more than two decades as an engineer and over a decade as a hiring manager I’ve experienced my fair share of terrible engineering interviews. From quizzes to whiteboarding, take-home tests to awkward real-time coding exercises; I feel as though every startup I’ve worked at has had the exact same growing pains. Read On »
Why is Python So Popular Despite Being Slow?
Let me reframe this question using different technology. Why are Toyota Corollas so popular despite being so slow? They're obviously much slower than rocket powered aircraft! Things just got crazy, right? Let's do some math to prove our point about how slow Toyota Corollas really are when compared to rockets. Read On »
Seth's Programming Books List
I love consuming new information. The first big breakthrough in my reading journey was Amazon's book delivery service. It was no longer necessary for me to coerce one of my parents into driving to B. Dalton and watch as I aimlessly wandered... Read On »
Security
Strong Random Password Generator
As cool as my Unicode Password Generator is, I feel it's not practical for daily use. This is my standard password generator. It uses a JavaScript implementation of PCG32 by Melissa E. O'Neill, and is 100% client-side. For added security generate multiple passwords and use chunks from each generated password.
I felt inspired after reading Jeff Atwood's post "Password Rules Are Bullshit". The concept is fairly simple: use Unicode characters in passwords. If you're using HMAC + bcrypt (and you should be) everything should work perfectly fine...
Sometimes I find it very difficult to generate my own passphrases for demo systems and such, therefore I decided to build this handy-dandy passphrase generator to ease the pain. Feel free to use it, and share it with your friends and family.
Projects
I've been investing in real estate since the 2010s and realized that my property investment modeling system could be used by others, so I built it!
I chatted with Nick Janetakis from Running in Production about the software and hardware stack that has been running the taleas website for the last decade...more.
seth.black Photography
I <3 photography, this is my personal showcase.
Adriana and I got married, so why would I not personally design, draw, develop and code our wedding website?
FindMeNoms is an easy way to "find tasty food around you wherever you are". This is a side project that was born out of my need for an app/website that would remember all of the tasty places that I have eaten at, or would recommend to someone, or have been recommended to me. Basically, Yelp wasn't cutting it, as I'd find myself falling down the rabbit hole of reading one-star reviews and laughing at how crazy people can be instead of actually finding food.
In 2008 I took up drawing as an easy way to vent my artistic frustrations (it was either that, poetry or expressive dance). After a while I had a solid little following and decided to publish my work on the internet as a full-fledged webcomic. Taleas is that comic.
This was a short-lived startup idea. The basic premise was, well, just watch the explainer video.
Document management for schools, doctor's offices, and pretty much anyone else who would give us money. Unfortunately it didn't work out too well. I did get a really cool logo out of it, though.
My very first startup: web development, web hosting and an ISP. This is the very first time I got to work with my friend Darrel. He designed our sites, logos, business cards and even mousepads! No joke.