I am a systems thinker. I alternate between working on deep problems and long-term problems, like developer momentum (productivity), mentoring, and tools selection, where I have an excellent track record. I have formal training in distributed computing, which turns out to be shockingly rare, particularly in this era of Cloud Computing. My early career featured a good deal of work in making fast applications in ‘slow’ languages, and I expanded from there into human factors, first UX, then data visualization, and then DevEx. I’ve worked in security and cryptography, compression, internationalization, cloud migrations. I am often the guy that gets volunteered for new domains we couldn’t hire for, and the person that QA brings their “I don’t know if this is a bug but…” questions.
I have done extensive work in team building, and the Software Development Lifecycle, including studying under or with two published authors in the Kanban space. I can set up a full CI/CD pipeline and explain at length why each step of the process exist, what it’s for, and why we should not take it out. This work and my Platform Engineering work were both substantial influences in my Developer Experience work.
For human factors, I had been trying to find my own way via online forums and conversations for a number of years already when Alan Cooper and Don Norman came onto my radar. They at least were my formal entree into the field.
For data visualization, long ago in a discussion about how terrible a particular graph was, I was introduced to Darrell Huff’s book, “How to Lie with Statistics”, and that sent me down a rather long road, and probably was part of my influence in human factors in general. Edward Tufte, in addition to his books, used to write/blog online, and I followed him for many of his active years. And while I often wouldn’t otherwise include Richard Feynman in this particular list, his warning about how you are the easiest person to fool, overshadows all when I think of data analysis.
For Software Engineering, I particularly appreciate the works of Kevlin Henney, Michael Feathers, Martin Fowler, Kent Beck, and a number of mentors I’ve had along the way, as well as many of the people I’ve in turned mentored. Teaching is a form of learning.
I am rediscovering the importance and pleasure of Going Outside. I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time on Permaculture, which is at its heart Systems Thinking as applied to gardening. The banner picture is one I took a long time ago at the Japanese Garden at the University of Washington Arboretum.