Author: Jud

Technologist interested in building both systems and organizations that are secure, scaleable, cost-effective, and most of all, good for humanity.
Like Molasses

Like Molasses

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I aggressively unsubscribe from email lists in order to get to Inbox Zero. Which isn’t an end in itself, but part of a broader strategy of radical responsiveness. I’ve been pretty good about doing so with my personal email, but my work email has gotten a bit out of hand.

So the past week I’ve been working on that, for my own email address and several shared addresses and aliases that come my way. It’s tedious, but progress is being made. However, I’m regularly baffled by the number of sites that report that unsubscribe isn’t instantaneous. Today I was quoted “5-7 days”, and I’ve seen as much as “2 weeks”. Why? What could possibly take that long?

Anyone out there in the spam email marketing business that can explain it to me?

Artifactory

Artifactory

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The other day I scanned and posted a gift I’d gotten from some co-workers. When leafing through the folder it was in, I found a few other fun artifacts I thought I’d share:

First, a certificate I got from my fourth grade teacher. It’s an objective I still aim for:

And second, an invite I got for helping support the underlying voting platform:

I’ve tried to do a better job recently of documenting my career experiences, not just the work-related items, but the fun stuff too. This week wasn’t so bad, even if the town isn’t my favorite:

Keep It Real

Keep It Real

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I did tons of hiring during my time at Amazon. I haven’t done as much in my new role, but that’s starting to change (any open roles I’ll put on my LinkedIn profile if you’re interested in checking them out).

There’s a lot I could say about the work of both identifying good candidates and presenting yourself well when you’re looking for a job. But I’ll keep it brief today.

First, when it comes to resumes, I could not agree with this advice more.

And second, during interviews, my number one thing: tell me what you did, not what you would do. Unless I specifically ask for a theoretical answer, I want to hear actual stories of actual work and actual outcomes. Experience is evidence.

Played The Fool

Played The Fool

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I’m not into pranks, giving or receiving. Maybe it’s just because my years are limited, but I don’t generally appreciate being inconvenienced in ways that waste my time for no reason other than humor. It’s a bit like an individualized corollary of the broken window fallacy.

Because of the above I get somewhat hypersensitive around April 1. I feel I’m generally good at sniffing out the BS, but I got taken pretty hard this year, cleverly enough that I have to tip my hat.

So a website I visit regularly posts periodic brain teasers. The one on April 1 sounded innocuous enough. The gist:

Start with a number. If it’s even, divide by 2. If odd, multiply by 3 and add 1. Repeat enough times, and you’ll end up with 1. Prove why that’s the case for any starting number.

I’m a sucker for that sort of mathy puzzle, and I spent a decent amount of time throughout the day noodling on it. Well, here’s the deal. Known as the Collatz conjecture, this convergence to one is famously unsolved, described on the Wikipedia page as “an extraordinarily difficult problem, completely out of reach of present day mathematics.” Lovely, so you’re saying this Ph.D. dropout is unlikely to solve it?

To be fair, I should have known. Numeric conjectures that intermingle addition and multiplication are notoriously complex, despite their apparent simplicity. I used to joke that a life goal was to solve Goldbach’s conjecture, which states that every even natural number greater than 2 is the sum of two prime numbers. Apparently I said this enough at my first job that when I left, they gave me this fill-in-the-blank certificate as a gift:

It’s a good reminder that it’s the “easy” stuff you have to worry about most. It’s never five minutes.

Dig In

Dig In

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Getting to know your professional colleagues at a personal level is risky. I regularly read advice to avoid it. That’s a reasonable strategy to avoid some of the lows of gainful employment, but it also hamstrings the chance to achieve truly beautiful successes, not to mention it forfeits a potent antidote to loneliness.

So yeah, not only am I going to ignore that advice, I’m doubling down on getting better at being a student of other people. To that end, last week I started reading How to Know a Person, from which I extracted the following list of conversation starters:

  • Which of your five senses is strongest?
  • What are you most self-confident about?
  • What’s working really well in your life?
  • What is the “no” you keep postponing?
  • What have you said “yes” to that you no longer really believe in?
  • What forgiveness are you withholding?
  • Tell me about a time you adapted to change?
  • Have you ever been solitary without feeling lonely?
  • Can you be yourself where you are and still fit in?
  • What crossroads are you at?
  • What would you do if you weren’t afraid?
  • If we meet a year from now, what will we be celebrating?
  • If the next 5 years is a chapter in your life, what is that chapter about?
  • What has become clearer to you as you have aged?
  • What is the best way to grow old?
  • If you died tonight, what would you regret not doing?

Full credit to David Brooks here, I’m just repeating his excellent ideas. Keep learning, friends!

Leap Day

Leap Day

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The world is a complex place. Time is hard, as evidenced by the plethora of things going wrong today. Naming is hard. Designing architectures is hard. Getting GenAI right is hard when the answers really matter.

And as it turns out, color is hard too! Did you know there are “imaginary colors”? I didn’t? How cool!

This is not an argument to run away from technology, but to say that we who do this work must be vigilant and realistic. The answer to “how long” is never “five minutes”. And we must engage across a broad set of disciplines, because our own perspectives are limited.

When confronted with complexity, the wrong answer is to retreat to comfortable simplicity. Read. Listen. Have an open mind and broaden your view of the world.

Two Things True

Two Things True

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On the same day I wrote about radical responsiveness, I came upon this post that seems to contradict it. I really respect Ethan Evans and enjoy his writing (especially this bit about why you fail to get promoted). And I understand the point he’s making about fragmented attention. The temptation to conflate interruptions with importance is real, and amplified by modern communication technologies. But I’m not prepared to say he’s right and I’m wrong.

For one, I believe it’s possible to be both radically responsive while remaining reasonably non-fragmented. Some degree of interruption is inevitable, but using techniques such as pomodoro can help protect focus while still ensuring important messages don’t get missed for long. Good old-fashioned discipline is required to stick to a plan, but it can be done.

The discipline gets easier with a well-configured set of tools, which is where many folks fail. Learn your tools! And not just the basic features, but the myriad of options for managing notifications, filtering messages, scheduling reminders, etc. It’s not a badge of honor to be “bad at email” or “not understand Slack” if you’re a professional in 2024.

(If any of my coworkers are reading this, they may quickly point out that as recently as last month I didn’t know how to join cell phone calls into a conference. Which… is true. But I learned! And now I know for next time).

Finally, Evans makes an assumption about communication that I don’t believe holds true. It comes through most obviously in this statement:

“Allow chaos to build up within the trivial (the inbox) to accomplish the meaningful.”

Did you see it? The assumption that messages in an inbox are trivial? Tell that to your customer who is informing you of a serious issue with your latest release, or your team member whose employment status is in jeopardy if you don’t respond to their immigration lawyer. Yes, we all get spam, but sometimes interruptions truly are critical and need attention. To lump all of that into the category of “trivial” for the sake of personal flow is a leadership fail. Communication is part of the job; sometimes it’s all of the job.

Of course, I could be wrong. Read the posts and decide for yourself.

It Is And It Is

It Is And It Is

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Last night ChatGPT had a bug. But not your run-of-the-mill problem like increased latency or complete unavailability. No, it went completely off-the-rails: spouting gibberish, repeating itself ad infinitum, and other nonsensical behavior.

Hilarious though some of the outputs were, it was a powerful reminder that AI technologies are still new and mysterious, and definitely require human oversight. While this incident ended up with random output, I can now imagine a whole class of bugs where language model outputs are wrong in all manner of specifically bad ways. Humorous now, but perhaps less so once we give them agency to act on our behalf.

I anticipate the day coming when I ask my personal Scarlett Johansson to book a family vacation to Fiji and it instead sends an email to my mom lambasting her for wearing white after Labor Day and then sells my living room furniture on eBay.

The future’s going to be something else, of that we can be sure.

Not All Who Wander

Not All Who Wander

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There’s a danger in over-indexing on successful outcomes when evaluating a decision. As a LeBron fan I respect making the right play even if the shot doesn’t go down. When watching football (I hear there’s a game today?) I shake my head at coaches who punt when the data says taking a bigger risk is worth it. The same is true when making business decisions and evaluating technical tradeoffs.

Simple math makes the above obvious in certain cases. Whether a decision has a 90%, 60%, or even 51% probability of success, it is the right decision to make, even if it doesn’t work out (presuming the cost of failure is equal no matter what decision is made).

Of course a nice probability cannot be known in most real-world situations. It’s in those moments when it’s especially important not to focus too much on the outcome. Because a failed result doesn’t tell us anything certain about the original likelihood of success, as even 95% certainty fails 5% of the time.

I don’t say any of this to mean that a pattern of failed outcomes should be ignored, but that full context should be used in any process that attempts to evaluate the road that led to certain results.