About

I am an analyst with a large national retailer with core experience in contact centers, open source communities, technical writing, process/reporting automation, business intelligence, and IT. My job affords me interesting opportunities to use technology to automate away or streamline business processes, and drive company and team improvements with reporting.

Prior to my current role, my longest job experience was working at a large independent new and used bookstore, which offered a unique experience among retail jobs. A large bookstore is a repository for vast amounts of human knowledge, and people come to bookstores seeking information on every subject imaginable. Helping someone find the tools to discover new knowledge, and the exchange of information that takes place when two people can connect over an idea led to very rewarding experiences. It's that feeling that I strive for in writing.

The culture of re-purposing and information sharing that the Internet and open source have facilitated is one of the great accomplishments of modern technology. I've spent a lot of time volunteering for open source projects—writing and editing wikis, blogging, bug triage and QA, administration, and community development—and the organic self-organizing environments found in open source communities have been extremely influential on me. I was an active community contributor to the Maemo community, Nokia's sadly short-lived open source smart device platform, prior to the platform's demise.

Interests

Rationalism

• Learning to think and reason effectively.
• Inasmuch as I identify with rationalism at all, it's probably with the post-rationalists, having been slightly disillusioned by the tendency towards narrow focus on modelling and systematizing in rationalism proper. David Chapman's meta-rationality approach appeals to me.

Health and nutrition

• Hashimoto's thyroiditis
• Gluten-free → Paleo → Autoimmune Paleo (AIP) → carnivore
• Four pillars of health: Nutrition, exercise, sleep, stress management

Sustainable agriculture

• Animal welfare with the understanding that animal protein is a necessary component in the optimal diet for most people.
• Farming practices that are a net environmental benefit (regenerative agriculture).

Photography (GeneralAntilles on Flickr)

• Wildlife, mostly birds, macro, mostly spiders and insects, and landscapes, mostly plants.
• Gear ideas (DIY macro flash bracket)

Politics

• How to protect oneself against
• Decentralization and federation
• Legal Systems Very Different From Ours
• Self-organizing systems

Automation

• Home (lighting, comfort, status monitoring)
• Task, process, and data collection (mostly work-related)

Remote work and how to develop a remote work culture.

• How does culture enable effective remote work, what tools are needed to enable remote culture?
• Timely due to the pandemic, difficult due to working in the only remote department at the company.
• Asynchronous communication, comprehensive documentation, knowledge management.

Writing and the written word

• Editing written English.
• Technical writing. I used to contribute extensively to the Maemo community wiki and the, since lost, E-Flight Wiki. Lately my efforts here have been limited to editing training materials and SOPs at work.
• Oxford commas
• rm -rf en_GB

Open source

• I'm a huge proponent of open source technologies and open source philosophy.
• I believe it's one of the more important developments in modern technology. It has enabled a huge amount of innovation that would not have been possible using a proprietary, closed-source model.
• I used to be deeply involved in the Maemo community back before Nokia got Microsoft'd.

Python

• Largely for data wrangling and reporting, some for process automation.
• It's just fun to work with.

IT administration

• Home lab
• Self-hosted services (privacy concerns and decentralization)
  • Nextcloud not Dropbox, Gogs not GitHub, Grav not Medium, Mumble not Discord, and Zulip not Slack.

Data wrangling

• Mostly work-related. KPI tracking, forecasting, budgeting, identifying areas of opportunity for improvement.
• Rectifying my deficient statistics background is currently a focus.

Contact centers and retail, a fact that surprises me to this day.

• Contact center organizational structures and staffing.
• Effective management approaches that maximize customer experience while balancing employee (development, morale, engagement) and business (cost, agility, effectiveness) needs.
• How to support and enable effective structures and management with technology.