August 2025 – Making Of Things

Oh, The Places You’ll Go!

By Jud | August 27, 2025 | Comments 0 Comment

Today marks the 10th anniversary of this blog. It’s been quite the career journey since I sat down to write my first post, appropriately titled Hello World.

At that time, I was sitting in a drab cubicle in a perfectly ordinary office building, probably gingerly sipping a cup of coffee (I didn’t start drinking coffee until about that time, if you can believe it) and getting ready to start my day of rewriting a large Perl application to meet a silly set of coding standards.

*At least the conference room was kinda cool*

Today, I sit writing this in the Rose Reading Room of the New York Public Library, about to embark on a morning of (hopefully) focused effort to provide architectural guidance and documentation feedback on a couple projects I’m overseeing. In the afternoon, I have a project kickoff to attend, and will likely have a smattering of emails and Slack messages to respond to.

Such is the life of a CTO. Gone are the days of 9-5 coding. Little did I know back when I started writing here (let alone 25 years ago when I was earning my computer science degree) where my career would be headed or what it would entail on a day-to-day basis. But that’s pretty normal it seems.

If you’re here, thanks for reading. I hope to keep doing it for another 10 years. But for now, time to get back to the day job.

2 + 2 = 4

By Jud | August 23, 2025 | Comments 0 Comment

I talk often about Conway’s Law, both here and in real life. I also talk often about working in the public sector. But for some reason I’ve never mentally put the two topics together and drawn the inevitable conclusion discussed in this article: Conway’s Law at Government Scale.

I’ve read Recoding America, and generally agree with the notion that a product operating model makes sense and leads to better outcomes. But here’s the thing: change comes slowly, if it comes at all, and solutions are needed now, across many domains.

I’m grateful for the work of those whose role is to reorganize and rethink government, and wish them success. But in the meantime, I see my role as working within the structures that exist now and doing the best that can be done. Projects can succeed, even with constraints.

Patience Isn’t A Virtue

By Jud | August 10, 2025 | Comments 0 Comment

I’ve had space on the brain recently, having in the last month visited both the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Johnson Space Center. There’s a paradox of sorts when thinking about interstellar travel called the wait calculation (or, in simpler form, the wait/walk dilemma). The gist is that we should not launch a slow spacecraft now because one sent later with a faster propulsion system would simply overtake it. Repeat that argument ad infinitum, and you’ll never launch, hence the paradox.

These days I’m feeling caught in a similar sort of trap when it comes to learning about AI, with announcements almost daily (just this week, GPT-5 launched, right on the heels of the release of a bunch of open weight models that can run all sorts of places, including Amazon Bedrock). Just when I think I’ve identified the technology I want to really embrace, new ones arrive that create new capabilities, deprecate old ones, and demand rethinking workflows. It’s disorienting.

You know what isn’t disorienting? Photos of cool command centers. Here’s three of them from my recent travels:

*The room where it’s been happening a while*

I’m a sucker for a good command center, that’s for sure. But enough distractions; I know I just need to dig into deeper AI learning. That’s the trick: just start.