JonWarden314

The mind, not the résumé.

I am difficult to describe by listing what I do, because the list makes it sound sequential. It isn't.

I can be designing an information architecture, helping someone untangle a technical problem, thinking about moral culpability in a sixteenth-century poem, answering a younger engineer who isn't sure where they belong, and noticing that somebody used one particular word strangely three messages ago.

Somewhere underneath all of that, there is probably music playing.

My mind is highly parallel. I don't experience engineering, philosophy, relationships, fiction, technology, faith, parenting, and curiosity as sealed compartments. They leak into each other constantly.

An API teaches me something about boundaries. A conversation teaches me something about information architecture. A poem gives me a better model of choice. A badly designed kitchen becomes a systems problem. Someone saying “hmm, explain more” can occupy the same mental landscape as distributed software architecture.

I work at the seam between business processes and software engineering: writing software, reverse-engineering systems, translating between people who know what they need and machines that require considerably more precision. Give me an ambiguous problem with several incompatible constraints and I become considerably happier than is probably normal.

I like systems, but I care about the humans trapped inside them.

A lot of my free time goes into talking with people—often students, younger engineers, or people trying to enter technology—because sometimes someone doesn't need another course or motivational speech. They need twenty minutes with somebody who can see the shape of the problem they are standing in.

I don't particularly want an audience. I'd rather be useful to one actual person.

How I tend to think.

Things I keep circling.

This changes. That is part of the point. These are less “interests” than recurring gravitational fields.

There is a person attached to the processor.

I am married and a father of three. That is not background decoration; it changes the rest of the system. I am a Christian, an empiricist, and a rationalist in the broad sense—which means I have had to become comfortable letting convictions survive contact with questions rather than protecting them from questions.

I write fiction. I read old books. I play Commander. I like technology, but I am more interested in what technology does to the shape of human choice than in gadgets for their own sake.

I have spent enough time around complicated things to distrust the instinct to make them simple too quickly. People included. Perhaps especially people.

Conversation protocol.

For a long time I assumed everyone else was doing roughly the same amount of processing and simply talking about less of it. I no longer think that is true.

Speed by itself is cheap. The useful part is holding several models at once, moving between them, noticing when unrelated problems share a structure, and staying with a question long enough for the easy answer to become unsatisfying.

Bring something interesting.

I like perceptive people, difficult questions, strange ideas, and conversations that leave both people somewhere different from where they started.

If you are trying to get into computers, AI, software, or manufacturing and do not know where to begin, ask. If you have an argument you cannot quite resolve, ask. If you have a bizarre question nobody around you wants to entertain, definitely ask.