The Curious Engineer

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N=1 (marcua’s blog)

blog.marcua.net

I’m the Co-Founder and CTO of B12. Before that, I was Director of Data at Locu, a startup that was acquired by GoDaddy. I went to grad school at MIT’s CSAIL. One time in Jerusalem I ate a whole tub of hummus on my own. I don’t regret that day.

Software / engineering practiceEngineering management / careersAI / MLDatabases

’10’15’20’25
Posts
86 from 23 May 2008 to 30 Oct 2026
Posting
monthly (20 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://blog.marcua.net/feed.xml

2026 18

  1. How to spend your AI productivity dividend
  2. If you write online, consider a “how I write” AI disclosure
  3. The prototype-plan-stack development pattern
  4. The prototype-plan-stack development pattern
  5. Authorize, don’t authenticate
  6. Authorize, don't authenticate
  7. Office hours for new and soon-to-be software engineers, product managers, and designers
  8. Office hours for new and soon-to-be software engineers, product managers, and designers
  9. Figmimic
  10. Figmimic
  11. Northeastern presentation to junior engineers in the age of AI
  12. Northeastern presentation to junior engineers in the age of AI
  13. B12 3.0
  14. B12 3.0
  15. Four questions agents can’t answer
  16. Four questions agents can't answer
  17. Claude Code and core dumps
  18. Claude Code and core dumps

2025 7

  1. Review: a bookmarklet to generate coding agent-ready code reviews
  2. Review: a bookmarklet to generate coding agent-ready code reviews
  3. ayb v0.1.11: Now sporting a web interface!
  4. Mentoring junior engineers in the age of coding agents
  5. Rich: Enrich your CSVs with new columns
  6. ayb v0.1.10: Now with Docker images!
  7. Maintaining control of our data with personal databases

2024 1

  1. Parting with Twitter

2023 1

  1. ayb: A multi-tenant database that helps you own your data

2022 3

  1. Data diffs: Algorithms for explaining what changed in a dataset
  2. how I use AI in my writing process
  3. How to archive a website that's shutting down soon

2021 3

  1. Autodata: Automating common data operations
  2. 2019 Book list
  3. 2020 Book list

2016 2

  1. Fun with Voter Data
  2. Crowdsourced Data Management: Industry and Academic Perspectives

2015 3

  1. Argonaut: Processing Complex Work with the Crowd
  2. A data differ to help journalists
  3. The N=1 Guide to Startups after Grad School

2014 2

  1. Reproducibility in the age of Mechanical Turk: We’re not there yet
  2. Web Scraping Tools for Non-developers

2013 2

  1. My N=1 Guide to Grad School
  2. Locu has a new home

2012 3

  1. Locu
  2. What Should be Included in a Data Science Curriculum?
  3. One Gray Lady

2011 5

  1. John Glaser on Healthcare Information Technology
  2. Human-powered Sorts and Joins
  3. I'm a (STEM) Graduate Student: Please Tax Me
  4. Database papers at CHI
  5. Evening Project: What Would Hacker News Say?

2010 4

  1. Comments as content: The medium hinders the message
  2. Twitter Papers at the WWW 2010 Conference
  3. 256 colors in your xterm!
  4. Notes from NoSQL Live Boston 2010

2009 28

  1. Building a Social Data Commons
  2. FeedMe Data on People's Sharing Habits!
  3. Startup Bootcamp at MIT
  4. Avoid Subversion-Maintained Website Vulnerability
  5. Earn $30 for reading blogs!
  6. NYT_Transformer and Data.gov: Your chance for a weekend hacking project!
  7. MIT Database Systems (6.830) TA Course Notes
  8. Local Communities, Information Gathering
  9. Making the case for Raw Data
  10. Rethinking the Newsroom
  11. Driving in India
  12. Mumbai and home
  13. Goa
  14. Kolkata
  15. Darjeeling
  16. Delhi to Siliguri Summary
  17. Rajasthan Summary
  18. Youtube is (one part of) the next Google
  19. We're Back!
  20. Driving to Delhi from Jodhpur
  21. An Afternoon in Jaipur
  22. Rajasthani Forts
  23. Jaipur to Jodhpur by way of Ajmer Jain Temple
  24. In Jodhpur: a marketplace, a mindgame, and some biscuits
  25. Happily in Udaipur
  26. A night in Delhi
  27. Our First Night Venture
  28. Plane Ride

2008 4

  1. Landed
  2. Itinerary
  3. India
  4. Determining Postgres Page Size