Going into 2026 I’ve been trying to figure out how I feel about 2025. Here are some very rough and incomplete thoughts. Earth is a good spot to live Humans evolved to live on earth, it’s unlikely anywhere else universe will be more hospitable. If there is a place better than earth it’s probably too far away. We should do everything we can to preserve earth, all alternatives will be worse.…
I left my job in September and I am about to start a new one in January. The last few months I’ve spent most of my time wrangling a toddler, riding bicycles and taking care of household chores and projects. Important work but not geared towards thinking about how a packet gets from place to place in a correct, fault-tolerant and performant way. With a few weeks to go I have given myself an…
Failure Is Not An Option I ride my bike a lot . During most of 2020 much of that time has been solo riding. I got an Audible subscription and have been listening to books during my hours of solitude. Recently I listened to Failure is not an option by Gene Kranz. Overall an interesting insider’s perspective on flight control and the career of an flight director during the Gemini and Apollo…
Objects of Power Langdon Winner ’s Do Artifacts have Politics? ( synopsis of the essay ) has been a bit of a touch stone for me in the last few months. The essay makes clear that the things humans make have both intended and unintended consequences. Some of these objects affect society by being built with expressly political design but others are innately political simply by existing and being…
On a Plus/Minus for Engineering Teams Management is rife with sports metaphors, we are all team players trying to get our projects over the line . Netflix’s CEO famously said they are a sports team, not a family . We even go so far to identify individuals and create roles on engineering teams that map on to sports team archetypes, someone might be a good facilitator , quarterback or in clutch…
In Benoit Mandelbrot’s seminal The Misbehavior of Markets suggest market behavior has five rules. Rule 1 - Markets are risky Rule 2 - Trouble runs in streaks Rule 3 - Markets have a personality Rule 4 - Markets mislead Rule 5 - Market time is relative The book focuses on the behavior of financial markets, and using the rules can reduce society and an individual’s “financial vulnerability”. Reading…
Outages make me contemplative, every incident is an opportunity to learn and understand our environment better so we can become more resilient in the future. During a cross country flight yesterday I re-read some of my guideposts on how to think about complexity and systems. These papers remind me of both how hard the problems we, socitey and more specifically people in technology, are trying to…