Podcasts, white papers, data analytics, and more. A portfolio of highlights from my thinking and writing over the years.
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.
Who Gives – Tableau Dashboard
Storytelling With Data
This is a visualization of aid data available from the College of William and Mary, merged with a dataset from I had already been using from gapminder and the World Bank, which provide GDP and demographic information.
For details of the analysis, you can look at my LinkedIn article on the project. To play with the interactive components, check out the public dashboard on Tableau.
On Being Wrong About Systems
When we treat complex systems as if they were simple, we break them. They can recover *to a point*… and then they can’t. A quick primer on some of the math-related lingo, using the bowls and yogurt tubs from my kitchen as props. Three key points:
- How stability works in the local part of systems and what physicists mean when they say, “To a first approximation”
- What bowls and canoes can show us about tipping points
- What skills we are going to need to navigate our rapidly changing future
Side quests to define “local minima” and also to make my claim that if you see an 8-Sigma event, you almost certainly didn’t.
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.
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. “
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)