Engineering Philosophy

By default a reductionist #

Probably to a fault. Or maybe I’m just lazy and prefer to strip problems down to the bare-bones. If I were to put marketing jargon to it - I seek “Zen” when it comes to solving problems.

When something comes my way, be it a painting, a short story, or a problem - if I’m genuinely interested in it my mind will start to churn in all manners. “What happened in the past that led to this result? What would happen if xyz?”. For paintings I’d look at the proverbial canvas, colors, medium and try to picture where and how the artist approached the process of creation. For works of writing I would try to see where the story/plot is “flowing” given the prevalent motifs in the work up to that point.

For solving problems, I’d try to picture how I would want to solve it, what an “ideal” solution would be and then try to work out the various moving parts that would need to be orchestrated to carry things out.

This attitude of mine extends to my work. All problems or states “flow” from a source, and they can all have an “ideal” solution or equilibrium state.

My attention is usually between these spaces:

<source> -> <problem> -> <solution>

I’m always looking to remove a layer of unnecessary complexity or decision surface. With infrastructure, that’s how I move forward - trying to achieve this “ideal” state where all “primitives” or “moving parts” of the system are idempotent and easy to understand, easy to combine.

In that way, you could say that I’m a very big fan of POSIX standards - do one thing, and do it very well. I try to achieve that in all my work by the time it’s in production.

For samples of my thought processes and notes around my work, see the projects section.

Age of LLMs #

Like everyone in tech, I’m trying to find my niche in all of this. I’m going through the same explosion of generated code, comments, messages, blogs, images, etc etc (ETC!) that we see. It seems these days that in order to survive in big tech you either need to be swimming in the kool-aid, praying that with AGI we’re on the precipice of the second coming …or something in-between. Either way we collectively seem to be having an existential crisis of sorts if not feeling completely dejected and despondent.

Personally, I’ve settled on these key principles/opinions for myself, to steer my anxiety-addled mind:

• AI is here. Agents are here. No point in fighting it (regardless of how the datacenter situation turns out.)
• Unless proven otherwise (huge emphasis on otherwise) - it’s a tool. We should all learn how to leverage it where practical.
• I will never communicate with other humans using AI.

Role of the Human in an Age of LLMs #

Like any industry going through some upheaval, it’s better to accept that any technology causing disruption is here to stay in one shape or another. As a Millennial that viscerally experienced the world transition from no-internet to one day having cable/DSL and access to online games…I know first-hand what this feels like, and I’m not going to fight it.

However - it’s a tool. It’s incredibly fast at typing, debugging, finding all the nooks and crannies in which your code is broken/insecure.

It should NEVER replace the interpersonal relationships you have, though.

Maybe I’m an extremist in this way, and in the future I may have to eat my words, but if you work with me you will never have to ask did this guy copy-paste a message from ChatGPT and send it to me? or does he have an LLM responding to his emails?

queue higher-level SVPs that get thousands of emails saying that I’m probably not an important employee

I genuinely believe that it’s important for all of us, as humans, to strictly adhere to this kind of stance though. Who wants to personally interact with an LLM? When you’re down and have run out of tokens, with no LLM to interface with bots on your behalf - where will you go?

In this day and age where AI slop dominates our collective reality I believe that it is vital for us to maintain a shred of humanity somewhere.

The only way to do that is by leaving an avenue of true human interaction open to those that seek it. And this is something that needs to be consciously and intentionally preserved. Protected, even.