The Curious Engineer

All blogs / AI / ML

Daniel D. McKinnon

ddmckinnon.com

Musings on adventuring in the modern era and tinkering with technological curiosities

AI / MLTravelTech news / industry

’15’20’25
Posts
145 from 3 Sep 2013 to 29 Jun 2026
Posting
monthly (6 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://www.ddmckinnon.com/feed/

2026 5

  1. Founder’s guide to min(brain damage) when claiming the Google Startup’s Workspace Business Plus benefits
  2. Vibe coding my way to a healthy family: Introducing Gamow Labs
  3. A n00b PM’s guide to vibe coding kernels from scratch
  4. My 🌶 take on vibe coding for PMs
  5. Dan’s Voice AI Voice #49

2025 13

  1. Dan’s Voice AI Voice #48
  2. Dan’s Voice AI Voice #47
  3. Dan’s Voice AI Voice #46
  4. Dan’s Weekly AI Speech and Language Scoop #45
  5. Dan’s Weekly AI Speech and Language Scoop #44
  6. Dan’s Weekly AI Speech and Language Scoop #43
  7. Dan’s Weekly AI Speech and Language Scoop #42
  8. Show, Don’t Tell: A Llama PM’s guide to writing GenAI evals
  9. Dan’s Weekly AI Speech and Language Scoop #41
  10. Dan’s Weekly AI Speech and Language Scoop #40
  11. Dan’s Weekly AI Speech and Language Scoop #39
  12. Dan’s Weekly AI Speech and Language Scoop #38
  13. Dan’s Weekly AI Speech and Language Scoop #37

2024 41

  1. Dan’s Weekly AI Speech and Language Scoop #36
  2. Dan’s Weekly AI Speech and Language Scoop #35
  3. Dan’s Weekly AI Speech and Language Scoop #34
  4. Dan’s Weekly AI Speech and Language Scoop #33
  5. Dan’s Weekly AI Speech and Language Scoop #32
  6. Dan’s Weekly AI Speech and Language Scoop #31
  7. Dan’s Weekly AI Speech and Language Scoop #30
  8. Dan’s Weekly AI Speech and Language Scoop #29
  9. Dan’s Weekly AI Speech and Language Scoop #28
  10. Dan’s Weekly AI Speech and Language Scoop #27
  11. Dan’s Weekly AI Speech and Language Scoop #26
  12. Dan’s Weekly AI Speech and Language Scoop #25
  13. Dan’s Weekly AI Speech and Language Scoop #24
  14. One-Year RSU Grants are for Suckers or Quantifying the Free Option Value of the Four-Year Varietal
  15. Dan’s Weekly AI Speech and Language Scoop #23
  16. Dan’s Weekly AI Speech and Language Scoop #22
  17. Dan’s Weekly AI Speech and Language Scoop #21
  18. Dan’s Weekly AI Speech and Language Scoop #20
  19. Dan’s Weekly AI Speech and Language Scoop #19
  20. Dan’s Weekly AI Speech and Language Scoop #18
  21. Dan’s Weekly AI Speech and Language Scoop #17
  22. Dan’s Weekly AI Speech and Language Scoop #16
  23. Dan’s Weekly AI Speech and Language Scoop #15
  24. Dan’s Weekly AI Speech and Language Scoop #14
  25. Dan’s Weekly AI Speech and Language Scoop #13
  26. Dan’s Weekly AI Speech and Language Scoop #12
  27. Dan’s Weekly AI Speech and Language Scoop #11
  28. Dan’s Weekly AI Speech and Language Scoop #10
  29. Dan’s Weekly AI Speech and Language Scoop #9
  30. Dan’s Weekly AI Speech and Language Scoop #8
  31. Dan’s Weekly AI Speech and Language Scoop #7
  32. Dan’s Weekly AI Speech and Language Scoop #6
  33. Dan’s Weekly AI Speech and Language Scoop #5
  34. Dan’s Weekly AI Speech and Language Scoop #4
  35. Dan’s Weekly AI Speech and Language Scoop #3
  36. Dan’s Weekly AI Speech and Language Scoop #2
  37. Dan’s Weekly AI Speech and Language Scoop #1
  38. Product Management at Meta vs. Google or My Take on How to Evaluate your {Google,Meta} Offer
  39. On Transitioning to Product Management
  40. Y Google Cloud?
  41. On Climbing the Stat Arb (CEX/DEX) Leaderboard, Comparative Advantage and Careers, and My Future in Crypto

2022 1

  1. All is Fair in Arb and MEV on Avalanche C-Chain

2020 4

  1. 5 lessons from my journey with Georgia Tech’s OMSCS
  2. Amazon, Andes, and Archipelagos: 3 weeks of Bliss in Ecuador
  3. Bayesian Factor Modeling for Market Forecasting
  4. A brief history of acoustic modeling

2019 5

  1. The #McFry NYT wedding announcement that never was
  2. Southern California Backcountry Discovery Route++: A dual-sport motorcycle adventure from Death Valley to the Eastern Sierras
  3. A practical treatise on pairs trading, Bellman-Ford, Shannon’s Demon, and order book pressure: Tales from 18 months of cryptocurrency arbitrage
  4. The Giz Asks that never was: What’s the furthest you can get away from technology?
  5. In defense of WordPress or how I overcame static site envy

2018 6

  1. The Perfect 10-Day Camper Tour of Iceland
  2. From space to social: My next frontier or why I’m excited to join the Facebook Applied Machine Learning team
  3. DIY Dual-Sport Motorcycle Adventure: Following the Footsteps of Mad Max through AZ, NV, and UT
  4. Proud to contribute to the Guinn Partners State of the Drone Industry 2018 Report
  5. The end of DIY car maintenance and how I replaced the e-locker motor on my 2010 4Runner
  6. How to build and deploy a Twitterbot on your free AWS EC2 instance and my three-month retrospective on the subject

2017 11

  1. Voyage of the Curie: Two weeks of fui and bliss in the South Pacific
  2. How dual-sport moto pioneers built the legendary Rock Man trail across Baja
  3. Unlocking the secrets of the most remote places on earth with VIIRS and GIS
  4. Official Tourist Guide to Valle de Guadalupe
  5. Onward and upward: Farewell, 3D Robotics. Hello, Orbital Insight.
  6. Bringing ddmckinnon.com into the 21st century with SSL and HTTPS
  7. Becoming a Land Surveyor-in-Training in three easy steps: How to actually make drone data valuable
  8. On Dual-Sporting through Baja and Becoming a Certified Roadbook Rally Racer
  9. Congratulations to Project ARI for taking second place in the 2017 Big Ideas Competition
  10. The Joy of Network Scanning for IoT
  11. Video streaming from the RasPi cam: Toward building an autonomous robocar

2016 16

  1. Exploring the internet through REST APIs or how to build an HTTP client
  2. Sharing drone data in Mapbox for fun and profit
  3. October Site Scan R10C media roundup
  4. The Ultimate Guide to Dual-Sport Adventure across Colorado and Utah
  5. Navigating the byzantine FAA Part 107 registration process
  6. Secrets of the APL Concept 3 exposed
  7. The latest from Site Scan
  8. A poet’s guide to submitting a pull request on GitHub
  9. A photo essay describing the perfect Northern California three-day bike tour
  10. Idiot’s Guide to 8 Days in Thailand
  11. Transamerica Trail 2009: Change’ll Do Ya Good Tour for Adventure Motorcycle Magazine
  12. (Almost) 1000 km through The Free and Sovereign State of Jalisco: A motorbike tour through time
  13. Site Scan is out!
  14. Idiot’s Guide to DroneKit Android: Reskinning Tower for Fun and Profit
  15. The drones of CES in pictures
  16. 100 citations down!

2015 16

  1. Idiot’s Guide to DroneKit-Python: A Journey to WHOZ CHILLIN
  2. Reporting from my first University of Colorado Alumni Association board meeting
  3. Would you like to capture professional quality photos with Solo? Do you like Rube-Goldberg machines?
  4. InterDrone a smashing success
  5. Thanks to CITRIS at UC Berkeley for hosting me for their Fall Research Exchange
  6. Whale watching made easy and some of my other favorite shots from Solo
  7. Thanks to NASA Ames for hosting UTM 2015 discussion on UAS integration into the NAS
  8. Mobile mapping with Solo, GoPro, Tower, and the Agribotix Field Extractor
  9. ddmckinnon.com featured as EEWeb’s engineering site of the day
  10. Belated AUVSI recap
  11. Big thanks to UC Davis for inviting me to give the Keynote at the Ag Innovation Entrepreneurship Academy
  12. Heretical Guide to Getting a PhD in the Hard Sciences
  13. So proud to be part of 3DR Solo launch
  14. Beware of shipping revenue-generating parcels by USPS
  15. I happily landed at 3D Robotics in beautiful Berkeley, CA
  16. Tales from the trenches: Polymer science in the real world

2014 11

  1. I am officially an Engineer in Training (and tips for getting there from a non-traditional background)
  2. My Soft Matter paper featured on the cover of Issue 46
  3. My paper featured as one of Soft Matter’s “HOT articles for October”
  4. Congratulations to Nobel Laureates Shuji Nakamura and Eric Betzig
  5. My final paper from graduate school, “Measuring Cellular Forces Using Bis-Aliphatic Hydrazone Crosslinked Stress-Relaxing Hydrogels” published in Soft Matter
  6. My Biomacromolecules entitled, “Design and Characterization of a Synthetically Accessible, Photodegradable Hydrogel for User-Directed Formation of Neural Networks” out on ASAP
  7. ACS Macro Letters entitled “Coumarin-Based Photodegradable Hydrogel: Design, Synthesis, Gelation, and Degradation Kinetics” out on ASAP
  8. My article “Bis-Aliphatic Hydrazone-Linked Hydrogels Form Most Rapidly at Physiological pH: Identifying the Origin of Hydrogel Properties with Small Molecule Kinetic Studies” appears in Chemistry of Materials
  9. Agribotix wins the Cleantech Finals of the CU New Venture Challenge
  10. My Advanced Materials cover is now online
  11. My Biomaterials Science paper “Synthetic hydrogel platform for three-dimensional culture of embryonic stem cell-derived motor neurons” one of 2013’s most accessed articles

2013 16

  1. PE firms rush to gobble up low-growth chemical business units
  2. Randy Schekman, 2013 Nobel Prize Winner and HHMI Investigator, accuses scientific journals of tyranny
  3. My Advanced Materials paper selected for front cover
  4. Physics professor Steve Pollock named 2013 U.S. Professor of the Year and the future of physics research
  5. Food on the Table iPhone app will revolutionize the grocery industry
  6. Agribotix site is live
  7. What exactly is the problem with HealthCare.gov?
  8. Provisional patent application written!
  9. Filing a provisional patent application is no walk in the park
  10. The NSF and NIH are back!
  11. “Biophysically Defined and Cytocompatible Covalently Adaptable Networks as Viscoelastic 3D Cell Culture Systems” published in Advanced Materials
  12. Congratulations to HHMI Investigators Randy Schekman and Tom Südhof for earning the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
  13. The government shutdown forcing the NIH to turn away 30 pediatric cancer patients
  14. My Biomaterials Science cover won the JSCBB (our building) art contest
  15. A big thanks to my group for electing me September Anseth Group Employee of the Month!
  16. My paper, “Biophysically defined and cytocompatible covalently adaptable networks as viscoelastic 3D cell culture systems,” accepted for publication in Advanced Materials