Fascinations

I’ve learned many languages to a proficient and professional level, but Golang is my new favorite. It was created to be straightforward, easy to write and very fast. Concurrent processing is a first-class citizen in Go, and thread-safety is embedded in virtually all of the default implementations of global packages, so it is really, really easy to implement true parallel-processing algorithms. I spend a lot of time working with huge amounts of data (billions of HTTP requests, millions of images, etc), and when I am not able to use a more well-suited tool (Hive, Hadoop Map/Reduce, Spark, Athena, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB), I increasingly find Go to be the best tool in the box. »

Our greatest challenge today is effective communications. The world has become incredibly connected and internet access is both ubiquitous and instantaneous. The sum of human knowledge is literally at our fingertips, and yet we find ourselves talking past one another. The polarization driven by the media, online advertising and social networks has created a hostile environment in which each person takes the least charitable interpretation of every other person’s view, while ascribing the most negative intent. »

The world is changing. Humans have two main types of marketable labor: manual labor and knowledge-based labor. In the pre-industrial era, virtually everyone that was working was doing manual labor. The industrial revolution arrived and threatened everyone’s earning potential. People famously predicted massive unemployment as the workers were replaced with machines and left with nothing to do. This didn’t come to pass, however, because the population exploded, quality of life increased exponentially, and eventually a large percentage of the workforce transitioned to knowledge-based jobs. »

I am an enthusiast landscape and photographer and astrophotographer. There is something very satisfying about capturing an image. When you gaze at a surreal scene in real life, you are totally embedded in the context. You feel the cold chill on your neck, wet from the 2 hour hike that you’ve just finished. The light, which until now has been a faint glow on the horizon, has just broken free from the landscape and pierced your iris. »

I was interested in electronics for as long as I can remember, but at some point around age 12, I really caught the computer bug. Computers in the 90s were basically just complicated electronic devices, and in those days, breaking out the soldering iron to install some new memory was not unheard of. By the age of 14 I was building computers for other people, and my parent’s basement was basically converted into a computer repair shop. »