Since I first wrote an XDCC script in mIRC years ago, I've had an interest in decisions, the types of input given to systems, the psychology of them, and how to react to them algorithmically. Naturally, I have gravitated towards the expanding field of machine learning and artificial intelligence even without my being aware of it.
During my stumbling and circuitous path, I've taken on more than a few tasks which seemed worth doing, or, perhaps, had been neglected. While it hasn't always been glamorous, it made me realize pushing a task forward is a manner of leadership and its something people need help with. For some time I've avoided accepting recognition as a leader, even outright dodging it, while still being willing to take on the costs of the extra work and taking it on the nose when things go wrong.
At one of the places I worked there was a quote, written on the walls of one of the buildings, which took me years to enjoy, and to accept, as a part of who I am:
I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what's next.
If you go to an art museum, or cave, or the art wall in a kindergarten, you get a good sense of just how different a view people can have of the world. What makes those walls or exhibits work is the context they put the observer in. It's that contextual setting, and making all the brilliant people in a room aware of it, which grows products and solutions.
We use computer vision to supplement landing intelligence, from the plane, at airports which don't have advanced systems installed on the ground.
Before coming to Wayfinder I designed and implemented the migration of the Vahana project's infrastructure to AWS from a local setup. It helped the autonomous electric aircraft project process and understand flight results more quickly.
We thought we could help people with addiction using cognitive excercises to address some of the roots of their negative personal outcomes. Our modality for engagement was chat, SMS, and MMS.
Accepting user feedback for a poorly functioning web-form is a lot different from that which this project generated.
At the peak of Apple, their products made people think differently about how they felt about technology and themselves. There are no minutes here I'd exchange for minutes elsewhere.
I remember thinking "change management should review the work that's going to happen, not what I say I'm going to do". After leading the Puppet implementation in the IT org, Siri asked me to help build what become our own K8s. When I look around now, I see Vault, Maas, Bright, and to some extent, K8s, and realize I created a creature of the same species or genus with some really smart people and had fun doing it.
I like to joke that I worked in education when I was an SRE at McGraw-Hill. Here I changed how we did deployments of the McGraw-Hill Education products which influenced the notion kids learn differently and should be asked questions appropriate to the assessment of who they are as learners.
Getting on-board with McGraw-Hill was a step sideways from working on the first (maybe the actual first at SoM) genomics cluster at the NYU SoM. Learning about how to gather requirements for a cluster and design the systems of control for data used in, at the time, a large data project was new and exciting. People are strange and wonderful; a fair amount of design took place playing Big Buck Hunter at a bar with a cast Hollywood could never concieve of.
When I got to Genpact, I was excited to keep moving along a management track. Six Sigma, Lean, Fishbone diagrams, and all the tools and idea they created were amazing to me. They took decisions, input from questions, and applied process to them in order to mechanize how a business ran. While I was managing a few engineers in various locations in the US and abroad, I felt like I needed more time as an engineer before I could understand who they were, as people, and how to get them to direct themselves instead of using a top-down approach.
Prior to Genpact, I did low voltage wiring installation. That's phone systems, voicemails, and yeah, pulling CAT 3 and CAT 5 cables through walls, floors, and wherever it needed to go. In the evenings, I built an all Irix datacenter with a co-worker. During the downtime, presumably when wires were running themselves through walls and such, a local pilot and radio broadcaster taught me about intrusion detection and prevention. We built a firewall, which we sold, and a traffic shaper, which we sold. At the time it gave full exposure to every part of the Linux kernel. Coupled with some CSU/DSU work, shadowing the T-turn-up guy, I learned networks in a way which I don't believe I could have otherwise.