Personal

Automating my indoor air quality

2020 was a lot of terrible things, and one terrible thing we learned a lot about was wildfires. 2020 was the worst year for wildfires in California history, topping the previous worst-ever year in 2018. We saw the first ever gigafire (1 million acres burned) in California, and facing down one of the driest Januaries on record in 2021, it seems like year-round wildfires are the new reality.

Poor air quality is an insidious thing. You can’t always see it or smell it, and you might not feel sick. But, over time, these small particles build up in your body and have a detrimental effect on your lungs and heart. Population-level studies from polluted cities in China and India make it very clear: breathe a lot of fine particulate matter (PM2.5), die sooner.

Source: Hoodline

So, air quality is a problem, but what can we do about it? The recommendation from the CDC and other health organizations is simple: stay inside. Wildfires and other major sources of air pollution like cars and factories are outside, so by staying inside, you lower your exposure to bad air. This makes sense, but when the skies are literally red because of suspended smoke particles, these basic measures may not be enough.

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Bucket list: Catch a fish and eat it

I checked off one of my bucket list items yesterday: catching a fish, cleaning it, and eating it.

This was the last day of a family vacation in Port St. Lucie in Florida. My original plans to go deep sea fishing fell through, so I went to the surprisingly well-stocked local Walmart to pick up some freshwater gear. I was lucky enough to nab a healthy-looking 15″ largemouth bass with a silver Mepps spinner from the lake behind our timeshare.

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Apache Hadoop committer

A quick post celebrating that I recently was made a committer on the Apache Hadoop project. I owe a big thanks to everyone who’s reviewed my patches and helped me along the way (especially my colleagues ATM, Todd, and Colin here at Cloudera).

My very first patch was HDFS-1952 in May 2011, via a Hadoop hackathon hosted at Cloudera. It was the most promising newbie HDFS JIRA on the list, and I still remember all the basic issues I had checking out the repo, setting up Eclipse, using Ant, and generating the diff. Two years later, these things have gotten easier 🙂

Here’s to many more contributions in the future!

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Grad school four months out

Here’s my account of leaving the PhD program at Berkeley to work at Cloudera. My experience might not be representative or generalize beyond my own situation, but I’m writing this because a number of people have asked me about the differences between grad school and industry. Choosing to leave Berkeley was a very personal decision, but fortunately I’m happy with how it’s turned out.

This also serves as my “Year in review: 2012” post, since this was the major change in my life last year.

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Bucket list: Cycling a century

I’ve been taking a little time off in between transitioning from grad life at Berkeley to working full-time at Cloudera. I decided to use some of this vacation time to check off a bucket list item: bicycling an imperial century (100 miles). Here’s my experience, and advice for anyone who wants to do the same.

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Year in review: 2011 (personal)

I like to take some time every once in a while to think about what I’ve done that I’m proud of, what I’ve learned, and what I want to do. With the beginning of a new year comes the perfect opportunity to reflect on my life in the year past.

I’ve split it into two separate blog posts, one professional (meaning research and grad school life) and one personal (meaning hobbies, self-improvement, life goals). This post covers the latter; my personal life in 2011.

This post is also split up into different sections. The first is again accomplishments, then I cover time management, my 3 main hobbies these days, and then misc other personal stuff.

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Posted by andrew in Personal, 0 comments

Year in review: 2011 (professional)

I like to take some time every once in a while to think about what I’ve done that I’m proud of, what I’ve learned, and what I want to do. With the beginning of a new year comes the perfect opportunity to reflect on my life in the year past.

I’ve split it into two separate blog posts, one professional (meaning research and grad school life) and one personal (meaning hobbies, self-improvement, life goals). This post covers the former; my life as a grad student in 2011.

First, things I’ve done in the past year that I’m proud of. Next, meta-comments related to research. Finally, a section on teaching, since I TA’d CS162 this past semester (my first teaching experience).

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Posted by andrew in Personal, 0 comments