Jason Becker
Even though I read more books and pages than ever before this year, my habit wasn’t exactly consistent. I basically flatlined to end the year. Let’s hope for a similar quantity next year, but more evenly distributed. Reading is a habit that I want to nurture, not a binge activity.
My life will be defined by the last decade. How could it not be? In 2010 I graduated from a fifth-year master’s program and entered the workforce full time for the first time. Elsa and I started dating in 2010 as well. I began both my career and family life with the decade.
These were the first ten years of my adult life.
Author’s Note: Each image is a thumbnail. Please click through the galleries– there’s quite a bit of this story being told in their titles and captions.
In 2011, I bought a condo, Elsa and I got a dog, Gracie, and moved in together.
In 2012, I quit my first job and started a fellowship with like-minded education data professionals. For the first time, I had a meaningful professional network. I left my first job for all the right reasons. I had learned a lot but could see no opportunities for growth or change on the horizon. My boss would hold his job for at least another 7 and maybe 10 years. I wasn’t sure I’d want his job anyway. I was trusted and respected, and already had opportunities to work in almost all parts of the organization and choose the projects I wanted to contribute to. I had a great job, but it would be that same job forever. Meanwhile, three years out from finishing my undergraduate degree and a couple of years out from graduate school, I saw many of my classmates switching jobs into new and exciting opportunities that they came across through the professional networks they were building. I was building no network— we had no money for professional development, a complete travel ban unless required as a part of a grant, and I worked in a state agency in a small state. It a was hard decision— I did enjoy my job, but I needed to leave to grow.
In 2013, I struggled professionally. I left a supportive, if limited, environment and found myself unready for the rigors of independence. I had two bosses in two different organizations, both of whom saw me as self-motivated and self-reliant, My work was largely long term projects. I went from working in a cubicle on many small projects always on a team to working alone in a quiet office or from home if I chose to do so. While I had a professional community through my fellowship, in many ways, my daily professional life was quiet and lonely. I made steady progress but had a hard time building day to day motivation. I had long thought I might get a Ph.D., but it became horrifyingly clear that managing an independent, long term research project was draining, not invigorating. I enjoyed teaching and being a part of an academic community, but I knew the long odds of getting a tenure track position. Now joining academia not only seemed unobtainable but also undesirable. What was I going to do?
In 2014, I asked a question that changed my life, leading me to meet Jess and become one of Allovue’s first employees. I still can’t quite believe the series of events that conspired to put us in a room together that day, for me to ask a conference panel a question, for her to hand me her card, and for me to know just enough to realize that a once in a lifetime opportunity fell in my lap. I met my future boss, mentor, and a dear friend through a chance encounter 2000 miles from home. During my interview, Jess told me she saw “C-level potential” in me. I didn’t understand what she meant, or what she saw in me that I did not see in myself. I guess she was right, a pattern that continues until today, because…
In 2015 I became the Chief Product Officer. I formally left behind a role defined by data analysis to one defined by product management. I am not sure I knew what product management meant. I’m still figuring that out. 1 That summer, we released our first product, Manage. The night before a major product demo and our “announcing” we were in the market with our first customer, everything was broken. I was shaking I was so nervous. At every moment, it felt like I was about to be more proud of what we had accomplished than of any other thing I have done in my whole career or like we were about to fail in some irrecoverable way and this ride would be over. We got it fixed, it worked, we made our first critical sales, and Jess was able to raise our Series A round that fall.
In 2016, a family health issue led us to leave Providence and moving to Baltimore, where Allovue is based. Elsa’s mom moved in with us and brought along with her our second dog, Brandy. Moving was hard. We had just completed redoing our kitchen and bathroom and everything at our condo was just how we liked it. Although Elsa decided to leave her job and was looking for work, the last two years we had started to feel established in our community in Providence. We had solid personal and professional supports. Providence became the home we built together, but it was time to go. In retrospect, I’m glad we left.
In 2017, we lost my grandfather. I turned 30, and I started to take working out more seriously because years of work travel and neglect made me feel bad. I wanted to get back some of the healthy habits I had built a few years prior when Elsa and I both lost a fair amount of weight. Allovue’s CTO Ted left, and I was put in charge of development in addition to design, product management, and data integration. Although we weathered that initial transition well, I think it’s only in 2019 that I truly began to feel comfortable with my new role. We also released our first version of our Budget tool, our second major software product. We bought our house in Hampden, Baltimore. For the first time, we have enough room for family and friends to visit and stay with us and we can host holidays. I love our new home and we’re building a nice life here. Some of my heart remains in Providence, but Baltimore is nudging its way in. I still don’t feel I’ve built the strong emotional ties to Baltimore I had for Providence, but I’d like to get there someday.
In 2018, after a long battle with pancreatic cancer, my Uncle Doug died. I left two weeks later for a wonderful trip with Elsa and visited East Asia for the first time. When I came home, my grandmother had passed away. A month later, my Uncle Marty, who lived with me throughout my childhood, was gone as well. It was the worst two months of my life. The rest of this year is a blur.
In 2019, Allovue doubled in size. We acquired Equiday. We started to put a lot of work into scaling our people and processes and started to work on some still-secret projects that I believe will be the core of our next decade of success. Elsa and I took a wonderful trip to Spain. I failed to keep up with any meaningful physical health routine, but my mental health improved. 2019 is one of the best years I have had in a long time. I rose to meet some major challenges. I traveled more for fun than I have in years. I felt more secure in my friendships, and I felt more secure in my ability to do my job. It took a decade, but at the end of 2019, I’m feeling pretty good about the adult I am still becoming.
At midnight, 12/25 we got engaged after nearly 10 years together.
Ted, our CTO who has since left Allovue, was a huge mentor to me those first three years. He was always generous to my ideas and experience managing software and technical integration projects in a dramatically different environment and helped me to understand how software was built differently in product companies and software consultancies. He always respected and elevated my technical skills, both within our private conversations and with colleagues. I still struggle with feelings of inadequacies in this area, but Ted never hesitated to lift me back up and remind me we all struggle with imposter syndrome. He never made me feel not up to the task, but instead like I had someone to work with to get better. I think it was his idea that I should be made Chief Product Officer, or at least I know that he was strongly consulted about my growing role at Allovue. And when he left Allovue in 2017, he was clear that he felt comfortable doing so in part because of his faith in my ability to take on the leadership of the team he worked hard to build. ↩︎
Although I have been to New Orleans twice before, we never made our way to City Park. The Sculpture Garden was a real highlight of our trip. Here are some select photos from our time there.
I am working on writing a “decade in review” blog post for here and decided it would be cool to include some image galleries. Inspired by Steve Layton’s post, I thought GLightbox sounded like just the thing I was looking for.
But whereas Steve’s clever trick was to use Javascript to add the right structure to all the images on his site, I decide to go a different route and write a custom Hugo shortcode to support using GLightbox. Custom shortcode? Shortcode? If you’re not familiar with this part of Hugo, the static site generator that powers Micro.blog under the hood, well you’re not alone. A shortcode is a Hugo-specific extension to your Markdown posts so that using a specific syntax you can dynamically create complex HTML content. For example, you can use a Hugo shortcode for YouTube videos so that you only have to supply a small ID slug and the proper embed HTML is generated.
Since getting GLightbox to look right with images requires a fair amount of HTML markup, I wrote the following in my custom Micro.blog design under layouts/shortcodes/glightbox.html:
Check out my post on Vertigo comics worth reading to see GLightbox in action using this short code on my Micro.blog site!
Now that I’ve shaved that yak, I can get back to writing my decade review and finding the pictures I want to use for it.
“Are you going for walkies or….”
Since it’s funding formula time in RI again, here’s a list of things I’d change, in no particular order.
Fundamentally, privacy is about having control over how information flows. It’s about being able to understand the social setting in order to behave appropriately. To do so, people must trust their interpretation of the context, including the people in the room and the architecture that defines the setting. When they feel as though control has been taken away from them or when they lack the control they need to do the right thing, they scream privacy foul.
I had forgotten about this great danah boyd talk from SXSW in 2010. I was discussing the idea of ephimerality and its place in the open, social, indie web this morning at an IndieWeb/Mastdon meetup at XOXO Fest when Kevin Marks brought up danah’s work.
Social networks have broken many technologies that built into our socio-cultural fabric and we have broadly failed to account for this. For example, the four properties danah cites in her dissertation: persistence, searchability, replicability, and scalability. None of these properties exist if you meet someone for a conversation at a coffee shop. None of these properties exist if you meet someone at a party. None of these properties exist if you meet someone at a community meeting. Each of those settings is open and public, and yet the interactions that exist there are broady ephimeral. True, each of these interactions may generate more permanent artifacts (a personal journal, a text conversation with a friend, a newspaper article about an event), but no one expects a simple search in 10 years can pull up the exact comment an individual made during these interactions.
The term “publish” is used a lot in web technology because it represents what happens when we share on the web. We publish content. Most of the content published on the web today, however, is not meant to be published. Most people feel like they are just talking. Our collective interpretation of the context of the social web for a long time was wrong. Two trends— opting out all together and increasingly performative use of social media— are both conscious, sensible responses to realizing how the web really operates today.
The early internet was better at community. It was harder to search across any and all communities, which led to poor discoverability. Human moderation breaks down once communities exceed a certain size and pace, leading to burn out and the destruction of vibrant communitiites. And the lack of persistence, which was theoretically possible but practically a crap shoot1, helped to create safety. If you found your pocket of subculture of the internet, you could learn the rules and become a part of comprehensible community. It was discoverable enough to bring people together who felt alone and rarely found common interest in real life, but hidden enough (and boring enough) to feel more like meeting together to talk at the local library or coffee shop. We meet in public, but we operate under shared rules and assumptions as a community. We may have URLs and data on a server, but that data is precious to us and not about a record of our relationships for the universe.
That the web was more inclusive and discoverable than “real life” is the feature we have turned into a bug with powerful search and centralized platforms that create no barrier to community entry.
What I remember from my earliest writing on the internet, whether in chat rooms or on LiveJournal, was how powerful it was to be vulnerable with a community. And while the early days of publishing on the web coincided with the heightened emotions of being a young teenager, I still find it difficult to replicate the vulnerability, safety, and catharsis of the early web. As a closeted introvert, I always found it hard to find supportive community in person, but I used to thrive at finding that online.
I love the world of blogs. I love reading personal writing and opinions. I love choosing whose writing, photos, and videos I get to see. I love having flexibility of how and when I read those things using tools like RSS. I love the idea of having a canonical space in my control tied to my identity for what I do online. But as I pull away from the current social web in favor of these features of the old web, there are so many features I miss. I miss the safety of a conversational, but obscure community. I miss the easy, bidirectional discoverability of people who share my interests. And I miss the incidental discovery of amazing stuf that centralized social media excels at.
The popularity of community Slacks/Discords, the increasing push toward closed Facebook groups, the popularity of Snapchat and Instagram Stories, I think, demonstrates a struggle to find some of these old features of the web. But I fear the incentives are just not aligned right on this issue— big tech does better pushing toward those new features of digital spaces, and it will be complicated, hardwork to build technology platforms that both allow for some of the common features of in-person social interactions and succeed at having mass appeal.
Maybe I’ll just have to learn how to make friends the old fashion way. Does anyone still do that?
How many thriving web communities using early BBS or forum technology lost all their data due to a single hard drive failure? ↩︎
A little jazzy/post-rock situation, via r/postrock.
When you say, “Ooof, alright” three times in 5 mins it’s probably time to step away from the keyboard.
Also, new key cap day.
There was a stat that we have half as many households with children today as in the 1970s. That seemed over stated to me, so I searched for where the statistic came from. According to Reuters, we have indeed seen the number of households with two married adults and children decrease in half from 40% of all households to 20% of households. However, there has been an increase in single parent families and the population of children in the US has increased over 15% sinced 1970.
The shift to smaller households (2.6 members v. 3.1), both from having more single person household and fewer married couples with children, who themselves have fewer children, are part of what’s driving the end of the suburbs. But I hope the suburbs are also dying because they represent a totally unsustainable cost structure.
And maybe, just maybe, information technology clobbered so many of our informal, personal relationships that we can’t stand the idea of also isolating ourselves in single family homes and lose the informal interactions that living in an urban city provides.
Fiction writers often create story bibles to keep track of characters, their back story, and world building history and information. It might include timelines, both for the events of the story and events in characters’ pasts that influence the story. This helps to ensure a consistent story world.
After the failure of the movies that shall not be named, I hoped we’d see an end to the concept of prequels, but lately it seems like there’s an explosion of prequels.
So what’s the problem with prequels? Why do they always disappoint?
A good author starts their story at the most interesting point. Good fiction is rarely a biography of its characters, starting at the beginning and covering the most mundane details of their lives. Stories always start in the middle, and they start in the best middle, just as the most interesting events unfold that lead to change. 1 If the good part of the story occurred sometime and somewhere else, that’s the book that would have been written.
The problem is that story bibles are incredible, rich texts. An author who falls in love with their own story falls in love with the world it occurs in and the people who inhabit it. It can become easy for both writers and fans to forget that the story bible exists in service of another, better story rather than being the story itself.
The audience is left wanting more, the writer has so much more written out already that they are in love with, and the result is the most tedious form of commercial art, the prequel. Mystery and magic are flattened to mundane events, motivations are explained rather than discovered and experienced, and unnoticed plot holes and inconsistencies in the original work are clumsily “corrected”. 2
Prequels are what happen when we forget that writers are at their most powerful when they choose what story to tell.
Ok, not all stories use this traditional structure, but stay with me. Most stories do this, especially the kind of fictional stories with commercial success that demand prequels. ↩︎
Ok, but here’s the part where I will admit I do like how Solo: A Star Wars Story treated Star Wars treating a parsec as a unit of time instead of distance. ↩︎
Vertigo Comics is no longer. Long the “adult” imprint of DC, Vertigo was a great place for lovers of comics and graphic novels that took on deep issues with often dark or horror content.
I’m not the best person to write about what Vertigo meant, but I thought I’d share three things Vertigo printed that I have loved.
Of course I love Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman. Linked is volume one of The Absolute Sandman, which I think is the best way to read this comic. You can’t be a fan of dark fantasy and not devour this complex mythology. You can’t be a fan of comic book art and not drown in every page. Follow the tales of the Seven Endless: Destiny, Death, Dream, Destruction, Desire, Despair, and Delirium. 1
A violent traipse through iconic American settings, American Vampire shows two creators, Scott Snyder and Rafael Albuquerque at their best. 2
Brian K. Vaughan is one of my favorite authors, and these days may be as well known from Saga as Y: The Last Man. What if there was a virus unleashed into the world that killed all males, including animals, except one man and his male monkey companion? Y: The Last Man is a great post-apocalyptic tale and a perennial recommendation from comic readers to someone who as never clicked with the genre.
I chose this panel from this Reddit post. ↩︎
I chose this panel from this blog post about American Vampire. ↩︎
Spain achieves low infrastructure construction costs in part by setting its regulations as well as internal oversight and procurement to maximize the speed of decisions.
Writes Alon Levy, revealing a fascinating way to reduce public sector project costs in his piece on The Private Sector’s Role in Transit Innovation.
Done is better than good.
A maxim he shares that I never heard before reminds me of Simple, correct, fast: in that order, something I definitely agree with when it comes to software development. This is also a lot easier for transit and infrastructure if you follow another slogan I learned from Alon, Organisation vor Elektronik vor Beto.
And of course, as a former public sector worker, everything Alon says about hiring in his piece is painfully familiar.
General indifference within HR to applicants. A Boston resident was offered a job at the MTA that required residence within New York City; as the potential hire had a partner who worked in Albany, they proposed that they should live in Poughkeepsie and the MTA hire would commute by Metro-North. HR required them to file forms stating their exact address in Poughkeepsie, never mind that they still needed to find an apartment in the area and had no reason to do so without a written job offer. The applicant was unhired and the position remained unfilled for years.
Although, I disagree with Alon’s seeming suggestion that transit agencies are best led by PhD engineers and whiteboard exercises are good hiring practices.
There has been renewed discussion recently over the role YouTube is playing shaping the ideas and views of Americans, ending in this embarassing performance by Susan Wojcicki at The Code Conference.
Although plenty of energy has been directed toward The Algorithim, a current catchall for all things scary in tech, I am delighted that our criticism of technology is finally getter a little deeper. I think we’ve turned the corner away from fighting about whether systems engineered by humans make biased decisions (of course they do), and we’ve moved on to a more insitutionalist argument against the way Big Tech, and more importantly, our government, responds.
The problem with hate speech, bullying, radicalization, and extremism on large, centralized platforms that rely on human generated content is not that we try to build tools that can manage the unrelenting firehose of data. The problem is that we refuse to regulate and enforce principals-based policies on speech. I owe this thought to Emily Bazelon who astutely pointed out, in an almost throwaway comment, that we have no problem regulating industry in all kinds of ways, except tech, except when it comes to copyright protections.
And here lies the failure of neoliberalism— we have totally failed to find ways to recognize non-economic harms of speech. With copyright, our laisse faire attitude toward regulation is gutted quickly and effectively, because of course we have to protect the economic interests of artists 1. But when it comes to the social, cultural, and political interests, we are suddenly powerless. We are beholden only to rigid rules-based systems and our capacity to require and engaged in human judgment is stripped from us.
We can’t block bigots, hate, or harrassment because we cannot possibly identify them and they have no harm in a massive sea of endless content. We’re all supposed to believe that.
I’m glad it seems we don’t any longer. I hope we take action.
Where artists are defined as large shell corporations of so-called rights holders extracting value out of other people’s artistic work that’s decades old. ↩︎
I am finally reviewing some of the pictures from our recent vacation to Spain that were shot on our Sony NER 5X instead of my iPhone XS.
A few observations on photography.
Here’s two pictures… can you tell which is which, even after processing and being resized?
