craig

WowWee Fingerlings, a Wearable Smart Toy

If you haven’t yet met the Fingerlings, you soon will. They’re already getting hyped up as the toy of the 2017 holiday season (a la Hatchimals). Given I’ve two girls that will probably want the hell out of these things, I figured it’s worth a dig. At first glance, these things appear to be the next evolutionContinue reading “WowWee Fingerlings, a Wearable Smart Toy”

Things to Consider When Buying Toddler Puzzles

Toddler puzzles are a great educational and entertaining activity, and you can start early. At around 10 months, babies start to do their own version of puzzles: putting stuff – especially their pacifiers – into containers, and taking it all out again. This exercise helps children develop basic motor skills and problem solving. As theyContinue reading “Things to Consider When Buying Toddler Puzzles”

Toddler Tech and Tablets – Where to Draw the Line?

Should you let your toddler play with a tablet, or other “toddler tech”? It’s a divisive topic. Many parents have strong opinions about this. Some claim their kids won’t be touching technology until much older; some extremists even suggest not showing the kids TV until it becomes necessary! Other parents note that given technology isContinue reading “Toddler Tech and Tablets – Where to Draw the Line?”

5 Fun Toddler Construction Paper Crafts

It’s raining out, you can’t bear to watch another episode of Dora or Diego, and you’ve got hours to pass before nap time or the next meal. And your toddler is just getting started! There are plenty of activities you can use to fill the time – building and then breaking stuff, maybe a boardContinue reading “5 Fun Toddler Construction Paper Crafts”

From Diapers to Dartmouth

This article on preparing toddlers for the Ivy League was originally posted on the Scouted blog. ** A few weeks ago during Scouted team lunch, I joked that I’d write a blog post about how to prep your toddlers for the Ivy League. So, true to my word, here are my initial thoughts on collegeContinue reading “From Diapers to Dartmouth”

Do finance majors get the finance jobs?

The following is a copy of a post I authored about finance majors for Scouted. see the original over at the Scouted blog. *** Back when I was in college, it felt like everyone majored in Econ (our Finance major equivalent), or Econ and something else (CS in my case). At a school with noContinue reading “Do finance majors get the finance jobs?”

What is The Product Development Process?

Or: do Ninja Coders Write in Invisible Ink? *** Calling all talented technologists! All dabblers of data! All muddlers of math! Can you curry lambda calculus problems with ease? Could you A* your way out of a friggin’ maze!? Do you dream in oh-so-glorious-code!!? If so, we want you, oh prophetic rockstar programmer ninja warrior!Continue reading “What is The Product Development Process?”

Web Scraping, Part 4 – Scrapy

While it’s all well and good to know how to retrieve pages, parse them, and build a crude web crawler, there’s no reason to reinvent the wheel given there are many open sources libraries that package this up for you. The most prolific Python library for scraping is Scrapy. In this post, I’ll use Scrapy to scrapeContinue reading “Web Scraping, Part 4 – Scrapy”

Web Scraping, Part 3: Scraping Case Study

In this post, we’re going to use what was covered on web scraping in the first two posts (#1 and #2) in this series for a web scraping case study: scraping contact details for all of the jewelers certified by the American Gem Society. The AGS is an organization that “[helps] protect the jewelry-buying public from fraudContinue reading “Web Scraping, Part 3: Scraping Case Study”

Web Scraping, Part 2: Parsing

In the last post, we saw that many times the web page you request is not the page you receive. Similarly, often the page you’ve downloaded looks nothing like the page you end up viewing. When you download a web page, your browser executes scripts that transform the raw content into something entirely different. Consequently,Continue reading “Web Scraping, Part 2: Parsing”