What I’m Doing Now

I’m living in the Kansas City, MO area, raising two boys with my wife, and working for a healthcare tech company.

My current motivation is to explore big questions (inspired by Bret Victor’s “What Can a Technologist Do About Climate Change” and the Time Well Spent movement). I’m observing, thinking, and collecting a set of important questions to guide my focus for the next several decades.

Besides that, here are my current priorities.

Work-work:

  • Because I like the open digital commons, I’m working on a talk that covers a lot of what’s influenced my career–from the Carnegie library in my hometown to WebAssembly in the browser, and all the institutions preserving and extending access to digital culture and information.
  • Because I care about efficient code and simpler systems, I’m studying the Rust systems programming language.
  • Because I believe that the most productive thinking you do comes when you break out of a rut, I teach a class to early-career developers on applying principles of antifragility to code, systems, organizational culture, and careers. I’ve also given a number of DevCon talks on topics including machine learning from free text with scikit-learn, and efficient data-oriented design with Rust.

Home-work:

  • Publishing more of what I write. I’m setting up a blog to cover mostly technical topics. Soon this item will simply be “Writing” with a list of pieces. First step was to set up this blog and migrate past writing.
  • Reflecting on the important questions I want to explore. Soon this item will simply be a list of the questions guiding my work.
  • Plotting a novel, but slowly. I write to share values with the future.

Currently reading:

  • 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
  • Andrew Carnegie by David Nasaw
  • Meet You In Hell: Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and the Bitter Partnership that Changed America by Les Standiford
  • Working by Studs Terkel

If activities or priorities change, I’ll update this page. Last update was January 23, 2018.

(This is a now page…if you’d like to learn more, you should make one, too.)