I’ve really enjoyed working on the Wallet Attached Storage project and with the Digital Credentials Consortium more broadly. Was honored to get a call out in their digital wallet repository:
Thanks for the quick response!
And if you’re interested in learning more, dear reader, you’re welcome to attend the Wallet Attached Storage Webinar, scheduled for next Tuesday at noon Eastern.
That feeling when I run terraform apply in production:
Thankfully I’ve never had an outcome quite this dire, but I’ve seen databases go up in smoke, amongst other infrastructure-as-code disasters. Tread lightly!
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
Dropdowns in web forms are generally good; they make it simpler for users to input options correctly and ensure back-end data integrity. They can be limiting at times, though, so I have to respect an event registration website I used yesterday that tried to be all-encompassing in the selections for “Title”:
I have to imagine this list came from some out-of-the-box form generation tool. Or created by GenAI, perhaps? I’m curious what it could have been. And was it not modifiable? Suffice it to say several of the choices are fairly pretentious given the event I was buying tickets for, so I feel like maybe the developer should have looked into culling the list.
Technologists love to collect and share horror stories (see, for example, The Daily WTF). It’s one of the reasons this blog exists, as a brag document of a different sort.
No matter how stressful the situation may be, no matter how long the debugging session took, no matter how brain-melting the eventual solution was to implement, on those days when you experience a moment that you know will go into the annals of “how the heck did this happen” infamy, it brings a smile to your face.
For me, yesterday was one of those days.
It’s a little too early to tell the full story in a public place (the key stakeholders should get to hear it first), but I hope to eventually. It’s an all-time head-scratcher.
Despite having had a number of opportunities to do so throughout my career, I’ve never progressed beyond being an average public speaker.
Thankfully I don’t have any particular phobias about it, and I can do a decent job relaying facts while being mildly interesting, but I’m far from a great orator, especially when I have to speak on the fly.
Still, every once in a while I’m happy with my ad libbing. This past week I spoke at a conference, and came up with this turn of phrase that I quite liked:
Universal problems are often best-solved through many local partnerships.
Perhaps that’s why I enjoy building for state government so much?
Ever need to dump all your AWS Security Hub findings to a CSV file for easier analysis? I got you.
Kinda crazy that export isn’t built into the console, though. Can I submit a feature request?
Sitting on a late flight to New York City last night, I spent a few minutes time rereading my previous writing on radical responsiveness (yes, I do this sometimes). In the former post I said the following (and yes, it’s absolutely self-indulgent to quote myself, but here we go):
Being known as a responsive person 95% of the time usually means others will assume the best of you for the 5% of time you fail.
That ratio got me thinking: at what response rate will others start losing faith that you’re a responsive person, and thus begin not giving you the benefit of the doubt? It’s gotta be higher than 50%, because I can’t imagine thinking a person who’s likelihood to respond is no better than a coin flip could be viewed as a reliable responder. Maybe 70% or so? I bet a plot of actual response rate against fraction of people who will perceive said rate as responsive would look something like this:
The lesson: earning trust in responsiveness is hard, and keeping it is even harder!