I'm Sungjoo Ha, and I go by shurain online. I'm VP of AI at Match Group. Before that, I spent years at Hyperconnect getting research to work in production. I started as a software engineer, moved on to applying evolutionary algorithms and machine learning to financial time series, and I'm still an engineer at heart.
I strive to be a competent man, so I learn from many domains and carry what works in one over to the others.
What I cannot create, I do not understand. — Richard Feynman
I take that literally. When I want to understand a concept, I draw a map of it and write things down to check my reasoning, because gaps show up on the page before they show up in my head. Most of my writing exists to help me understand my own thoughts. Once I drew how the ideas in machine learning connect and which foundations each one rests on, and that map taught me more about the field than anything I'd read. It grew into A Short Course on Machine Learning.
At some point I noticed that thinking tools work like any other tool: people who pick them up think better. I've been collecting and building them ever since, and Charlie Munger's latticework of mental models has shaped my toolbox more than anything else.
I write about learning and leadership in the Blog and Core Dumped.