Stories

I have learned a lot about myself over a 30+ year career in tech. I started programming in 1983 on a Commodore 64, and had my first job programming in 1988 in Cobol for the software used by schools in Oregon. I now realize more about my personality traits that attracted me to computers, but also the reasons why companies were looking for nerds like me to program computers, and it isn’t just that I knew a certain programming language—it was more about the human things I don’t see than it wa...

Growing up as a libertarian, when I heard others saying they are libertarian I’d hear someone who was fed up with the state of politics and separating themselves from the fucked up status quo, but now I just hear someone who hasn’t done any deep reading or have talked to many black and brown folks about how the world works. It is something that pushed me to abandon this portion of my identity between 2010 and 2015.

It is a real challenge to help people who are struggling with an overactive brain understand the importance of reading and writing, but my advice for anyone struggling with mental stability and health in this moment is to turn off the TV and the Internet (hint: they are the same thing), and pick up a book and begin reading. While reading, also begin to write down your thoughts about what you are seeing, thinking, and feeling. If you do this for long enough, you will begin to find your way....

I’ve done some research work to help improvise my usage of the word abstraction. I have wildly used the word throughout my 30 year technology career, and was looking to sharpen how I apply the important word. I’ve learned that I came by the slippage in meaning rather ignorantly as part of my computer science indoctrination over the last couple of decades.

All of the fluoride insanity you hear from RFK is stuff I heard growing up in Oregon. It isn’t anything new. However, as I heard a video of RFK stating how you get dumber every bit of fluoride you ingest, I can’t help but think about why they are championing fluoride and not lead, when it literally has the same effect as what they are trying to attach to fluoride.

I heard our transportation secretary say our subways are dirty and dangerous. It is something I’ve heard throughout my life and even parroted early on in my adulthood. As someone who now rides the subway as their only means of transportation and is obsessed with how the subway works and doesn’t work, it has become a revealing statement for understanding how people are racist and can’t separate how they feel about people and how cities work.

I love walking down the streets of New York City and hearing the diverse languages that are spoken. I can spot French, Italian, and occasionally German and Spanish, but I also am hyper aware of the diversity of eastern European and central and south American that I can’t always tell the nuance of with my poor hearing. Every time I catch a conversation in another language I think about the people I grew up with who love to say you have to speak English in the United States.

Poppy and I got another flat in the park yesterday. The sidecar wears through the rubber on tire in some ways I don’t fully understand yet and will have to work to dial in. Spots on the tire emerge as it raises up and then come down on the pavement wearing holes across the entire center of tire, but it is something goes much deeper in some areas. As we came off cat hill on the east side I heard a big pop behind me (my hearing sucks), and I quickly felt the familia wobble in the handle bars...

I was recently reading a lot about Stafford Beer a cybernetician from the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. A word he used to describe the world outside of corporations has gotten lodged in my brain this week—-variety. It is a simple word that seems innocuous and simple, but for me expresses in a meaningful way what I like about the very human world we live in. Oftentimes I will call the world messy, chaotic, and unpredictable, but I’d say varie...

I wrote about people with ear buds in walking through the world tethered to some indoor environment a while back, but today this week I am fascinated by cops on their cell phones. Both of these situations reflect our unhealthy relationship with technology which from my vantage point is being driven by APIs. I know many refuse to see it, but being on our phones so much ...

I like to clean my house. Not a simple clean, like deep clean, on your hands scrubbing the floor. It’s weird I know, but I do. I can get into a real zen place with it and I feel more connected to my environment afterwards and my mind (and house) feel less cluttered afterwards. I learned to clean from a lady named Liz when I was 17 until about 21. Liz, and her husband named Eld, would pay me to clean their house, and do chores around their property in exchange for herb.

The hype around artificial intelligence has been so great that the valuations of the companies producing AI have gone through the roof. Not necessarily just Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and OpenAI, but all the other startups in their shadows. Even the sensible uses of artificial intelligence are over priced and possess unsustainable valuations. This isn’t an industry that takes market humblings in stride, and will shift their focus to where money can be made. One might point the finger at ...

As we get close to the five year anniversary of Isaiah’s death, and as I continue to lighten my load in these stressful times, I am thinking a lot about the crushing weight of capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, and the uncaring nature of technology. When I spent the summer of 2016 out in the woods with Isaiah, I was reminded of the weight of the world on all of us in some profound ways that will...

As I reassess my career as a database and API specialist in this Trumpian age I am thinking deeply about how our computational need to categorize and organize things into databases, so that we can help thend to actually reflect some much more deep seated authoritarian tendencies present in our American society. I have read numerous stories lately about how categorizing and standing up a database and even an API begins from a desire to help a group of people, but then it quickly becomes abo...

I am drawing all the lines in between me and artificial intelligence to let folks know where I stand. I recently made it clear that I am saying no to artificial intelligence as part of my API Evangelist work, and where I stand with folks feeling...

What is normal? Your normal is not my normal. Is what is happening today normal or abnormal? Many Trump supporters think what is happening is normal. How do we assess what is normal and what is not normal? Who is the keeper of this assessment? Is normalization done through technology, policy, or through real world social mechanisms and the evolution of culture? I spend a lot of time feeling like I am not normal, when I actually think it isn’t me, and I am just being exposed to dangerous de...

I regularly make the mistake to believe in the business rhetoric around markets and building good products, and then I find myself neck deep within an enterprise you’ve respected for a long time from the outside-in. I’ve long ago stopped being surprised at how enterprise are run, and the scale, chaos, and ideology that is entrenched within them. For the longest time I was shocked when I encounter an enterprise who weren’t investing in standardization and governance, but now I understand th...

I am exploring the ways in which our relationship with technology plays out in the real world. I have long been obsessed with the intersection between people and technology as part of my API Evangelist work, but this is increasingly something I am interested in from the end-user perspective and specifically how end-users are being guided, exploited, and controlled using technology. Audrey shared an int...

I am working on a reboot of Kin Lane and what I do as the API Evangelist in the face of the authoritarian support present in the technology industry I have worked in for the last 25 years. I am good at what I do, and continue to do the work for clients who care, but I just can’t stomach being part of the cast of characters peddling AI, which has completely consumed the technology industry. While I have no idea what the future will hold, I am confident in my ability to reinvent myself. I ha...

We went to see the Emmet Cohen Trio last night at the Birdland. We try to go see Emmett whenever he is playing there. He is an amazing performer, and usually has some very talented musicians along for the ride. I will dig into Philip Norris who played bass this time and last time we saw him in another post, but right now my mind was blown by Joe Farnsworth who played drums last night. Maybe it was because we were front row in front of the drums, but more likely it was Joe’s skills, but in ...

Audrey and I listened to a keynote by Dan McQuillan on Responsible AI Means Decomputing at Goldsmiths, University of London yesterday. There are a number of things he focus on that resonate with me, but nothing more than is vision of how we need decompute and descale. These are concepts that will get you laughed out of the room in Sili...

As Poppy and I made our second loop of Central Park yesterday on our bike we stopped at the top of cat hill for a hot dog. I care some treats for Poppy but I usually find myself stopping at the top of the hill to remove a coat, drink some water, and align something on the bike. So buying Poppy a hot dog is something I do from time to time. As we sat in line waiting, a lady and young boy came up and asked if they could take a picture of Poppy—I happily obliged.

As a white person working in technology you tend to not think too much about why the SOMA (South of Market), Market Street, and the Tenderloin look like they do, let alone why West Oakland is in the state that it is. Audrey and I just finished The Pacific Circuit by Alexis Madrigal, which in my mind reveals why these places are the way they are, but more importantly it reveals the deal we’ve all made with the devil to look the other way when...

There has been plenty of times in my life where my head has gotten in the way. I experienced an overclocked and racing brain as early as 12 years old. Maybe earlier, but I didn’t have the awareness. It is more than just overthinking something, but seriously spinning out, with my thoughts spinning helplessly out of control. All I can do is just sit there and experience what is happening to me, and wonder what the hell is wrong with me, hoping things will eventually subside and I can get bac...

There are many things that leave me questioning the decisions people make around supporting the current artificial intelligence being unleashed on everyone in this moment, but the dishonesty I feel is a pretty foundational reason why one should stay clear of this shitshow. The dishonesty of the hustlers who have flocked to the space because of the financial opportunity, all the way to the polishing of artificial intelligences images using the word “hallucination” for when it lies sets a to...