I just discovered this handy list of all the Booker Prize winners, ranked. As I wrote a little while ago, I’ve recently decided to read Booker Prize winners almost exclusively, basically because there’s only so much time in the day and I’ve discovered that Booker Prize winners are generally really good. This list helps focus the search a little better! Though I can’t agree with every ranking - I can’t fathom The Sellout way down at 32, or Possession at a lowly 28 - in broad strokes it looks like a helpful guide. As luck has it, I just picked up Lincoln in the Bardo recently - it’s ranked #1!
For the longest time I’ve been really fascinated by what I call “socially relevant primary keys”. These are primary keys that take on a great deal of social meaning, over and above the requirements of any particular query or piece of code. Might be easiest to explain by way of example.
I spent a bunch of time listening to Allen Ginsberg’s Howl a little while ago, inspired by this rather long-winded and rambling piece on Moloch. I specifically spend a fair amount of time these days thinking about this line: “They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven!” Air travel, the Internet, global finance, and on and on - these are all pretty spectacular creations of the seventy or so years since Ginsberg wrote his poem, and they all require a ton of sacrifice from all corners of society. We are working devilishly hard to sustain something which is, as Ginsberg put it “pure machinery.” I’m not writing in protest exactly - I benefit plenty from all of these inventions, thank you very much - but rather in a kind of awe that Ginsberg had our number so well, and so long ago.
Sea of Tranquility is a wonderfully intricate novel with numerous interconnected storyline, separated by decades. There’s the girl living on a moon colony; an aristocratic “remittance man” bumbling around the wilds of Victoria Island; and something about a time traveler. The prose is really lovely and untangling the puzzle of it all is a certain kind of joy. That said, the “point” of the book came out to be a little strange and in some way uninteresting. The time travel elements did not help, either. Still I enjoyed the way this book fit into the larger “Mandel-verse,” at least as I understand it fits into Station Eleven and some others. On the whole I’m glad I read it, but I really would have liked a different resolution to the central conundrum of the story.
Hotel du Lac is a novel about a mildly famous writer, Edith Hope, who has a mildly infamous scandal that sends her packing to a remote hotel during the off-season, far away from her friends and family. What the scandal is, we find out relatively late in the narrative; how famous the writer is, we learn also relatively late. Neither is particularly fascinating!
I quite enjoyed this book and its numerous interconnecting plot lines. It was erudite, heavily library-themed, and a touch funny in the bargain. It was a challenge to read as well, in a good way - from the outset I was curious how these various plot lines would eventually intersect, and as they did I found it mostly satisfying rather than cumbersome. If I had to pick a favorite, I’d hazard that the Constantinople story line is perhaps the most fascinating, I think because it has the most color and its most evidently obvious how it connects to another story line (that of the oxen) early on. I don’t know that I’d ever heard the city referred to as “the Queen of Cities” but it makes a certain sense. I’m also not sure how historically accurate this particular siege is, but I don’t suppose that matters very much.
One of my roles at Chewy is to help lead the Promotions team, responsible for calculating promotions on several billion dollars worth of revenue. I’ve helped to design several cutting-edge projects that will be going live soon, to sharply reduce abuse of the promotion engine, to modernize the tech stack of our engine, and to provide customers with “last-minute” opportunities to earn discounts at checkout. As a staff engineer, I also believe in working to “level up” my team, and I’ve focused on introducing Architecture Decision Records as a way to improve our documentation and decision-making. We’re only just getting started!
I spearheaded the effort to stand up Wayfair’s enterprise API gateway in 2021 and 2022. This effort entailed two phases - first, wiring up the various components of the gateway, including its control and data planes, database, etc., and properly connecting it to our public network ingress layer. Second, and perhaps more challenging, was driving adoption of the gateway throughout the enterprise. We followed developer adoption best practices, starting with a couple of small, “simple” API projects that we could readily implement. Within six months of launching the gateway, we were able to onboard the API for Wayfair’s public extranet, a major pillar of Wayfair’s relationship with suppliers and other partners.
I’ve joined the committee developing the OpenAPI Workflows specification. Today the main OpenAPI specification enables API producers to document the “ingredients” of their API - that is, the resources which the API provides, and the operations available on those resources. The Workflow specification will enable API producers to document the “recipes” of their APIs as well - that is, how those resources and operations can be combined together to generate useful value for API consumers. I’ve contributed a couple of changes to the specification, and also established our relationship with the Cloud Native Serverless Workflows group, which is a related project.
Learn MoreAs the Innovation Platform Director at NGP VAN, I managed our documentation and was the primary support person for API developers. While there, I developed the “time to hello world” metric, and helped drive it down froom days to hours. I helped facilitate dozens of new integrations with the platform, notably the Mobilize events integration. I also guided our teams in designing APIs and oversee strategy for our API.
Learn MoreAn app which allows volunteers to earn points and badges in exchange for completing tasks to support a progressive cause or Democratic campaign. I led the team which developed this app in preparation for a ballot initiative in 2011, and subsequently expanded and generalized it for the 2012 mid-term elections. We won a series of Pollie awards for it!
Learn MoreA website which allows VAN users to easily publish virtual phone banks and distribute them to volunteers painlessly. I developed this application during NGP VAN’s first hackathon.
Learn MoreA virtual think tank for the progressive tech ecosystem. It’s my home for a catalog of ideas for improving the ecosystem, problems facing it, and useful resources for those seeking to build new solutions. There’s an accompanying Slack channel for folks interested in the progressive software space - feel free to join!
Learn MoreA site that aims to be a canonical list of the laws of software, including a bit of useful metadata about each one. I put together this site after realizing that no similar kind of list existed elsewhere online, and learned quite a bit in the process!
Learn MoreA short story I wrote about correspondence chess, in the format of kishōtenketsu. Yet another piece of techno-magical realism. It’s perhaps my most prosaic and didactic work about the limits of AI yet. Like my other stories, this one is source-controlled and available on Gitbook.
Learn MoreI'm a software developer who loves progressive politics and wonderful prose.
During the day I work as a Software Architect at Chewy, which means I work with a variety of teams as they puzzle out some fascinating challenges related to our promotion engine and analytics platform. I’ve spent decades as a progressive activist, and about the same amount of time as a software developer. Language-wise, I've dabbled in many languages - currently Kotlin, but also C#, Java, PHP, and Node. My particular professional area of interest is API design and governance.
I love reading, especially literary fiction, and have been doing my best to write a review of every single book I’ve read since 2013. Since I believe turnaround is fair play, I’ve dabbled in some writing projects of my own. I join book clubs the way some people check their phones.