What we see depends mainly on what we look for - John Lubbock¹

Some number of years ago (deep in the COVID era) I ran across a comedian named Ali Spagnola who had an interesting quote in her bio:

The term polymath^{2 3} is thrown around a lot these days . . . and Ali hopes someone will throw it at her. ⁴

It stuck with me for some time - partly because of the apparent audacity of such a statement, but mostly because it’s an interesting concept. How do you describe years of collected knowledge across a wide variety of fields, without falling into the “jack of all trades, master of none” trope? I’ll take my best stab at it below, and we’ll see what happens.

Process

Somewhere along the way I became the person who gets handed a vague idea and is expected to hand back something that actually works. That’s the job, more or less - part business analyst, part technical writer, part database nerd, all in service of the same problem: somebody has a thing in their head, somebody else has to build it, and the two versions almost never match until someone sits in the middle and forces them to.

Business Analysis

Most of what people call “requirements” are really just wishes with deadlines attached. My job is to sit with that wish long enough to figure out what’s actually being asked for, what’s technically possible, and where those two things quietly disagree with each other - ideally before anyone’s written a line of code, because the argument is a lot cheaper to have on a whiteboard than in production.

Technical & Software Writing

I write the docs nobody reads until the exact moment they desperately need to. That’s the whole design brief, really - a good doc isn’t there to be admired, it’s there to save someone’s afternoon six months from now when they’ve forgotten how the thing works (possibly because I built it and also forgot).

Databases

I will absolutely get worked up over a table design. A schema is the closest thing a business has to an honest self-portrait - it tells you what people actually think matters, whether they meant to say so or not. Getting that structure right, so it holds up under normalization and doesn’t quietly lie to whoever queries it later, is deeply satisfying in a way I’ve mostly given up trying to explain to people at parties.

Training

Knowing a thing and being able to hand it to someone else are two very different skills. I like the part where a room full of confused faces slowly turns into a room of people who get it - it’s basically the same rush as landing a good chord change, just with more spreadsheets.

Technology

None of the above happens in a vacuum - it’s backed by a genuine, slightly obsessive love of building and running things for their own sake.

• Linux and open source - my daily driver, my homelab, and the reason I have opinions about init systems that nobody asked for
• Networking - there’s something satisfying about tracing a packet’s whole journey and actually understanding why it did what it did
• Rust - the compiler yells at me and I’ve decided I like it that way
• dotNet - the pragmatic day-job counterpart to the above
• CI/CD - automating away the parts of my job I’d otherwise have to do by hand, badly, at 4pm on a Friday
• Homelabbing - an ever-growing rack of machines doing jobs that could, in fairness, be done by one Raspberry Pi
• Amateur radio - because sometimes you want to send a signal somewhere without the internet’s permission

Music

The love of music has been engrained in my soul since childhood. All manner and sorts of noises have been put up with by family and friends surrounding me - some of them much more pleasant than others. Early foundations of music include being a classical pianist, and accomplished enough singer and guitarist to have paid for many a bar tab. Tack on the world of synthesizers of all types, and it’s a veritable one man noise machine.

Initially spurred by need, I dove into the art of recording and live sound. In that sphere I learned that production and musicianship are symbiotic; a good engineer can become a much better one by understanding the emotion and intent of a song, and a great musician can push and break the limits of technology in order to make their audience engage even deeper into the story the music is telling.

Some fun examples:

• What Child Is This / Greensleeves - synths, drum programming, mix, production

• Lead Me To The Cross - arrangment, instruments, mix

• You Are The Song - recording, mixing, mastering

Arts

I spent a stint working production and QA at a print shop (Kinko’s, if you must know). Until then I had no idea that paper could be so fascinating? Come to find out, there are so many ways to blend the technical side of printing with the art of presentation and emotion.

• Printing
• Photography
• Darkroom printing

Communication

If you squint, pretty much everything on this page is the same hobby wearing different clothes: getting a signal from one point to another without losing what made it worth sending in the first place. Whether that’s a requirement, a chord progression, or an actual radio wave, the failure mode is identical - noise creeps in, meaning gets lost, and somebody on the other end is left guessing. I’d rather do the work of translating clearly the first time than clean up the misunderstanding later.

• Writing that assumes the reader is busy, not stupid - say the thing plainly and get out of the way
• Standing in front of a room and making a dense topic land, ideally with a joke in there somewhere
• Amateur radio, which is this hobby distilled down to its purest, most literal form