After I completed my undergraduate music degree at Virginia Tech, I stayed in Blacksburg for another year because I had no idea what to do with my life. Coming off running the VT Music department’s gopher and www site on a Mac LC running MacBSD (I used to praise us for being one of the first music departments on the internet in like 1992), I had a mind to be what we called back then a “webmaster”. But really I wanted to design and build and teach using multimedia music…

When I took the SAT in high school, I didn’t study. In the past I’ve told people about it, claiming it was the fault of the standardized testing regime and my not studying was a form of protest. In a lot of ways, the SAT shouldn’t be studied for… the middle word is “Aptitude”. Presumably the SAT measured what you’ve learned in school. I argued that if that were the case, I should take it without studying.

Cross-cutting cleavages of terminology between art and science show up daily my work in socio-technical systems. It feels a little bit natural that we lean on familiar constructs to guide us into new ones. As I’m prepping to talk next month at DevWeek 2022, I cannot help but look back at last year’s conference sharing my perspectives on navigating the difficult headwaters of categories through stories of metaphor.

On-call need not be a solo affair full of fear and anxiety. There are ways we can employ practice and open collaboration outside of incidents to prepare us better. We can learn how to adapt when our systems experience breakdowns at the edges, how to improvise when the answers are elusive, and how to evolve our understanding of the jobs we do by sharing our work together.

My wife and I were talking recently about how we feel like we’re floating in a constantly numbing “Groundhog Day” fugue state. Instrument building is a super effective way to change my entire frame of mind, much like getting deep into an improvisation or track editing session. So while it’s not anywhere closely related to my day job, my unconscious probably doesn’t see it that way. Regardless, it serves to dissipate the stress all around me.