I think it’s fun and funny to joke about delaying a task you dread only to have it take far less time than you expect. I just posted about that the other day.

But the truth is, problem solving is hard cognitive work and all that time in dread was my brain wrestling with the problem on some background cycles.

If I got started right away, the task would be tedious and hard, and I may not come to an answer I’m comfortable with. The right time to solve a problem is when it comes surprisingly easy and feels like the “right” way to do something.

In truth, I celebrate that I am getting better at identifying the right time and conditions to sit and work on a problem and seeing an elegant solution unfold quickly.

What I am struggling with is not feeling so bad during the waiting period when I haven’t quite figured out what to do yet.

A lot of white people in America who don’t support progressive taxes, and don’t support various ways government can redistribute wealth point to one thing: they have earned what is theirs. When we talk about reparations— they didn’t own slaves.

How many of them know the history of their wealth?

This story about two Baltimore neighborhoods is just one small example of how explicit government policy and action created and sustained a racial wealth divide just a generation or two ago.

Because I grew up in the New York City tri-state area, I frequently heard from people whose families, like mine, emigrated to the US with little, long after slavery. These immigrants and their descendants made clear that because they didn’t participate in slavery or the Jim Crow South and they came to the US with little, they had no reason to have to pay taxes that supported black people in America to correct for our original sin. It seemed preposterously unfair.

They were and are blind to the ways their own family wealth in America was created and supported through explicitly racist policy programs that lead to affordable home ownership for their families. They have benefited from white supremacy all the same.

I love living in human scaled places, but I’m surrounded by hostile roads in every American city. I’m thankful both Roosevelt Park (pictured) and a Wyman Park are within walking distance.

After the final version of SAFE is published, it will go to the courts. Its odds of survival are unclear. Historically, regulatory agencies win about 70 percent of their court challenges, Lienke said. Yet under the Trump administration, agencies have lost more than 90 percent of their cases, according to an ongoing tally from the Institute for Policy Integrity.

Many of those losses came in cases like this one, in which agencies published false, misleading, or fundamentally erroneous explanations of their own rules. In June, the Supreme Court held that the Trump administration could not add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, because the Department of Commerce’s internal motivations did not match its publicly stated reasoning.

Agencies must “offer genuine justifications for important decisions, reasons that can be scrutinized by courts and the interested public,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his majority opinion. “The explanation provided here was more of a distraction.”

– We Knew They Had Cooked the Books by Robinson Meyer

The frightening thing about Clearview is not that it works, and it’s not that we rely on them to not sell to bad actors.

Today’s episode of The Daily makes clear that its founders are not especially gifted at image recognition. They were not the top talents in this field. These are script kiddies who grabbed tons of data and implemented freely available methods and algorithms to build a terrifying product.

Scraping is not an advantage— any government (or private) actor can easily construct the same database. Training their dataset requires the know-how to implement published models and algorithms, which is not a unique enough skill to protect us.

We need to move past attempts to stop our technology from invading our privacy in this way– we’re way too late– and move on to finding ways to protect ourselves given this new reality.

We all need to adjust our threat models to assume our faces and photos are public and easy to access for anyone who wants to target us as individuals. Adopt new laws, policy, and personal security practices for this world.

Proxima Centauri is not just the closest star to our solar system. It’s turned out to be a fascinating system of its own, with now two planets like those we find in our own system.

I remember the disappointment I felt when I realized the stars of science fiction would probably remain unreachable, and that it wasn’t really clear that those we might reach some day would be worth visiting.

The last 10 or 15 years of astrophysics and planet hunting has thoroughly dispelled the idea that our solar system is one of a kind. It’s one of the most exciting discoveries made in my lifetime.

I hope we’re not one of a kind either.

This was in response to a tweet that has since been removed

Our schools can be improved. In too many places, the quality of instruction and quality of operations is far from great. I don’t think we have to fix poverty to fix schools.

But if we shift focus to quality outcomes for kids and not quality systems of education, it’s quickly intolerable that one in six kids live in poverty, many more live on the margins, and our social safety net is as byzantine as it is inadequate.

Semiosis was one of my favorite books from last year, so I’m not surprised I really enjoyed Interference. I think I’ve got a thing for first contact books and non-human narrators, considering how much I loved Children of Time and Children of Ruin.

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.

2010

2011

In 2011, I bought a condo, Elsa and I got a dog, Gracie, and moved in together.

2012

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.

2013

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?

2014

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…

2015

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.

2016

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.

2017

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.

2018

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.

2019

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.

A Fitting Finale

At midnight, 12/25 we got engaged after nearly 10 years together.

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.

1. Use AEWAV for state share of pension costs.
2. Increase state aid significantly that goes through the formula— say at least 25% over 5 years.
3. Lower base and add weights for home language (ELL proxy not determined by school staff) or “ever ELL” (ELL, but count a student who was ever and ELL and not just current).
4. Fully fund high cost SPED circuit breaker. Add a weight for high service percent per day SPED students, probably somewhere around 50% in service.
5. Double pay about 5% on charters (districts hold back 5% of total per pupil, state kicks that in extra for charters). Require districts offer underutilized space to charters with something like right of first refusal to try and reduce overall systems capital costs. Districts should risk forfeiting 5% if fail to offer space to charters.
6. Consider state wide minimum property/land tax to raise more money to go through the formula, reducing incentive/ability for high wealth districts to raise so much from local taxes the overall distribution of spending becomes highly regressive.

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?

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.