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. I’m starting to see more of the human side of problems around the communication and continuity of health care and how that relates to the realities of the workforce. No answers yet; just a lot of questions about the looming demographic crisis..

Besides that, here are my current priorities.

Work-work:

  • Learning more about AWS and microservices in service of helping define a larger machine learning ecosystem.
  • Because I care about efficient code and simpler systems, I’m doing more and more Rust programming.
  • 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. This year I’m taking a break from the DevCon talks, but I’m up for more lightning talks.

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.
  • Playing darts. I still suck, but I’ve improved over the last four months quite a bit. I’m learning a lot about deliberate practice and quieting the mind. Currently at a 52 PPR in 501 after 15 months of play, up from 39 a week after I started. Look for more dart posts. And maybe some code because numbers and simulation are fun.
  • Plotting a novel, but slowly. I write to share values with the future. Just not enough hours in the day…

Currently reading:

  • 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. Still chipping away when I can…
  • Currently writing more than I’m reading.

If activities or priorities change, I’ll update this page. Last update was April 2, 2019.

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