A collection of highlights from my recent technical, writing, and speaking engagements.
What Am I Responsible For?
Guest episode with Meg Heppner on The Art of Being H(You)Man
We booked this conversation to talk about how people work on system change, but it turned into a wide-ranging conversation that gets to the core of my philosophical contemplations from the last 20 years.
We touched on AI – both the way that minds interact with the current iterations and the possible moral implications of General AI. We talked about free will and moral agency, how we find out what’s true, the difference between what we perceive and how we interpret it… And all kinds of other things. There was a reference to Hildegard von Bingen, and she brought a Jungian insight into one of my own weirdest experiences.
There was more giggling than you typically hear on a philosophy podcast.
BackUpScale
In consultation with the software engineers, I developed the content for this project, including:
- Marketing video on the main page
- Whitepaper on the risks and benefits of various approaches to backups
- Technical details of the architecture for an integrated backup system
- Markdown language based website
- Deployment pipeline for site (docs as code – Hugo)
Microservices vs Monolithic Architecture
Consensus Enterprises
“One of the things that (we) engineers fall into is a desire to solve interesting problems. Kubernetes, as one of the newest and most current technologies, is the “Shiny” technology towards which our minds bend.
But it is complex, has a steep learning curve, and is not the first choice when deploying stateful applications. “
The Magic of Essential Systems
Guest episode with Bicurean Consulting “Business as Unusual” podcast.
In which I talk about my passion for technology, a vision for a world in which our systems are properly maintained and cared for, and of an ecosystem of tech businesses that remain viable and are not swallowed up by the tech giants.
Internationalization
MeetGary.ca
This site for refugee claimants was initially only available in English.
My contribution was the integration of translations with existing dynamically generated links using the Hugo site generator and a Gitlab pipeline.
This included three non-Latin character sets, two of which are RTL languages.