Understanding itself. That’s where things always seem to get complicated.
Carl paused, then leaned back in his chair. It occurred to him—almost sheepishly—that he hadn’t reviewed the Codec’s command documentation since his early onboarding days. He pulled it up, scrolling through the dense, dry index until a buried feature caught his eye:
Continue reading “Codec Debug Session 4: One Byte at a Time”The previous night had been a necessary rejuvenation for Carl. He had granted himself the nostalgic indulgence of some time in the Mushroom Kingdom—a perfect antidote to the cognitive wear and tear of the prior days’ challenges. This was more than escapism. It was an intentional part of his active recovery strategy. It was a way to counterbalance the rigors of his responsibilities and prepare for another period of peak performance. He firmly believed it was possible to love what you do and excel at it, but acknowledged that even the most fulfilling work required moments of deliberate detachment.
Continue reading “Codec Debug Session 3: Breakpoint”The appetizingly audible cracking open of the aluminum can was followed by a satiating, ice cold, citrus-y burst of carbonation as Carl sipped on his “something fizzy”. Something about carbonated water satisfies thirst in a different way than still water does. He referenced the list of topics that he had initially identified for remediating the decompression bug in the Techno-Wisdom Codec. He marked through the first two topics he had previously addressed leaving two more vying for his attention.
Continue reading “Codec Debug Session 2: Tell Us What You Really Mean”Carl had been employed as a quality assurance developer at Codecs-R-Us for the last several years. Leaving his previous job was a decision that he hadn’t take lightly as it had required a pay-cut and a relocation. However, joining Codecs was his way of reorienting a skillset that would have otherwise been squandered programming the benign business logic of some insignificant ad widget or progressively optimizing the performance of some destructively addictive social media app.
Continue reading “Codec Debug Session 1: All Your Database Are Belong To Us”It was the psychiatrist, Carl Jung, that cautioned us all about the perils of embracing “unearned wisdom”. Put simply, acting on wisdom obtained without supporting knowledge or experience can lead us down a path entirely inconsistent with the genuine intentions encapsulated by the original wisdom. The reason for this is interesting and merits closer examination.
Wisdom is a distillation of human experience – a compression if you will. The trouble with compression is that it tends to be (I might even suggest that it needs to be) lossy. Frequently packaged as sound bites or concise narratives, wisdom’s brevity renders it portable, persist-able, and repeatable. In this form, it can move easily through time and space and serve as a useful tool for those that are able to absorb and implement it. However, because this short-form representation is not a perfect replica of the original wisdom, of the original human experience, its use leaves ample room for misinterpretation and potential exploitation.
Continue reading “The Techno-Wisdom Codec Has a Bug In It”Last week, I spoke at the NASPI (North American Synchrophasor Initiative) Fall Working Group Meeting in Charlotte in order to share my perspectives on a recent multi-party collaboration in which my team and I played a central role. The collaboration was an exercise to create a data product but more fundamentally was an attempt to answer the question of “how can the [electric utility] industry make better use of its data?”.
A simple, cursory “update” didn’t seem worthy of the community, nor did it feel in line with my preferred style of presentation. So, to prepare my message for the conference, I looked for something deeper and more controversial thought provoking. And as desired, my comments, while calibrated, were very candid. I considered posting the speech verbatim (e.g. laziness). But after some consideration, I felt the message was more durable when distilled to something more general purpose.
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