Better People Than Scott Aaronson?
March 24, 2023 § Leave a comment
Reposting a letter sent to one of my Internet Heroes, whom I occasionally correspond with.
He is my Hero not because of his brilliant, thoughtful blog on quantum computing (though I do enjoy that), but his deep humility and public vulnerability.
« Read the rest of this entry »AORTA Spiritual Entrepreneurship Practices
March 6, 2023 § Leave a comment
Adapted from Perpetual Adolescence
1. Ambition: Desire -> Meaning
- Joy
- Love
- Glory
Beyond (Data) Contracts: A Response to Benn Stancil
September 23, 2022 § Leave a comment
This essay by Benn Stancil provoked me so deeply my intended “comment” evolved into a full-fledged blog post:
Fine, let’s talk about data contracts
Benn’s “rant” feels profound on so many levels, especially if I can assume he’s captured the zeitgeist of our industry as accurately as he usually does.
« Read the rest of this entry »PipeBook: UX Design Brief
July 9, 2022 § 1 Comment
A key design goal of PipeBook is to break away from the single-browser-window user experience of traditional data notebooks, to take full advantage of the large screens on today’s laptops and desktops.

PipeBook.yml: Reimagining Notebooks as Resilient Data Pipelines
June 30, 2022 § 1 Comment
See Also
- The Data Config by Benn Stancil (Medium)
- https://github.com/TheSwanFactory/pipebook (App)
- PipeBook: UX Design Brief (Blog)
- https://github.com/TheSwanFactory/fridaay (Framework)
- Data on Rails: Solving the Data App Imperative (YouTube)
Overview
The modern data notebook has its roots in academic tools for mathematical research. Because of that, notebooks are fantastic for open-ended exploration, but an awkward match for production data pipelines. In particular, they don’t:
- Explicitly declare and track dependencies
- Enforce organizational quality and reproducibility standards
- Enable easy testing, validation, and alerting
PipeBooks are a simple but radical re-imagining of notebooks as “tools for iteratively constructing resilient data pipelines.” The key is a novel data format called FRIDAAY that allows us to:
- Express arbitrary data transformations
- As a series of idempotent Data Actions
- Via a single, easy-to-parse YAML file
Story: Molly’s Life Thesis
June 9, 2022 § 1 Comment
Khommunity Enrichment Malls as the Pre-Future of School
As she walked up the corridor on her Last Day, Molly kept telling herself she shouldn’t be here.
No, whispered a cynical voice in her head. You shouldn’t even be alive.
Molly
« Read the rest of this entry »LifeView (Designing Your Life)
June 7, 2022 § Leave a comment
WorkView (Designing Your Life)
June 7, 2022 § 1 Comment
Work is creating something
Of value to others
Analytics Anonymous: The Missing Peace of the Modern Data Stack
May 31, 2022 § Leave a comment
Pitch 2 for Coalesce 2022 (unsubmitted) « Read the rest of this entry »
Pitch: Data is a Feature, not a Product
May 12, 2022 § 1 Comment
Communal Decision-Making Platforms and the End of the Modern Data Stack
Session Proposal for Coalesce 2022
TL:DR Businesses may start by developing a technical solution, but only succeed by integrating around a human problem. The same is true of the Modern Data Stack.
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