Sometime the 1990’s, a music term surfaced to describe a burgeoning style of electronic music. But let’s be clear here, the history of music is thousands of years old, electronic music at all is an infantile genre. But we are humans, and we love to name things, and so “Intelligent Dance Music” came to be.

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.

The full Practice of Practice Gamelan article can now be read at https://www.blameless.com/sre/sre-and-the-practice-of-practice