Recommitting to Writing

Feb 10, 2021

TL;DR

I'm going to write more regularly in 2021, mostly about technology, teams, and systems.

What I'm Writing

The Cliff: Can we avoid building?

In the Buffer

Emerging Architectures for Modern Data Infrastructure: I love writeups that fan out into 40 browser tabs. If you're a data engineer who is familiar with every tool in here, I tip my hat to you. Matt Bornstein, Martin Casado, and Jennifer Li over at Famous Media Company Andreessen Horowitz clearly did a ton of research to develop this.

Data Cascades in High-Stakes AI: discussing "data cascades", the compounding negative consequences of data quality issues on downstream AI systems.

"We sampled more widely in Africa due to the nascent AI Ecosystem compared to other continents [84], with 14 total interviews including Nigeria (10), Kenya (2), Uganda (1), and Ghana (1)."

"Goodness-of-fit metrics, such as F1, Accuracy, AUC, do not tell us much about the phenomenological fidelity (representation of the phenomena) and validity (how well the data explains things related to the phenomena captured by the data) aspects of the data. Currently, there are no standardised metrics for characterising the goodness-of-data [11, 13]; research on metrics is emerging [15, 91] but not yet widely adopted in AI system building."

Writing Strategies and Visions: Will Larson writes about a variety of Engineering Leadership topics, and I usually enjoy his clarity. I've come back to this particular piece a few times now. I'm looking forward to his new book Staff Engineer, as it makes its way up my reading list.

Secure Kubernetes access with Hashicorp Boundary:

Boundary and Teleport seem like the beginnings of BeyondCorp, even if Hashicorp isn't saying so. Speaking of which, GCP has a webinar for their BeyondCorp Enterprise product later this month.

What Happened

I really enjoyed writing in 2019. It was a great way to engage with technology, to meet interesting people, and to solidify my understanding of hard concepts. Unfortunately, 2020 was really terrible, and I let writing go in favor of other responsibilities. I missed writing.
Slowly but surely, I started building up a little bit of slack, a bit more organization, and in 2021 I'm going to try to write and share regularly.

What's The Slip Box about?

I mostly write about technology, teams, and systems. If those topics sound interesting, this is probably the right place for you! Sometimes I write hands-on posts about working with a tool or technology, and I try to find fun things to do with it. Sometimes I share my opinions or analysis, and occasionally I'll write a post that's "off topic".

What's Next for The Slip Box?

I'm going to try to keep to this format with small iterative changes, and I'm not going to settle on an SLA yet. I'm cautiously optimistic that "things" will get better in 2021, and that should make it easier to write consistently.