A little about me

And what to expect from this space going forward Unlike many of the big names in blogging, I don’t have an existing audience from a long career in journalism or another form of writing. I imagine this is actually both a blessing and a curse; it might be nice to have people reading my work, but I don’t have any expectations that I have to meet. One thing that it definitely is, however, is a blog where anybody that reads it will have no idea who the hell I am or what my plan is for my writing here, so it’s probably a good idea to start there. Who the hell am I? Hi! For starters, my name isn’t Fred Jawa - that’s a Star Wars character that I randomly decided to use as a profile picture once (a decade ago) and then stuck with. At some point, I’ll probably switch to using my name as as my username (if only to claim the username so nobody else can use it), but I’ve been active in online spaces since before Myspace and Facebook made it seem normal to reveal personal information online, and old habits die hard. Anyway, my name is Stefan. I live just outside of Boston, a city that I love despite its many, many flaws. I grew up north of San Francisco before I moved to Boston, which probably tells you something about my general political leanings (I’ll talk about this more in a second, but you can also check my first post for a detailed example of how I feel on one specific issue). I’m a software engineer, currently working on a digital advertising team for a large e-commerce platform, with the last five or so years of my career being in tech lead or senior IC roles. I’m also a long-time musician, with twenty years of guitar playing and fifteen of various types of vocal performance under my belt - I currently do both of those things in a band and am working on recording an album of original music, which I’m sure I’ll share here once it’s done. I’m a bit of a news and politics junkie (okay, more than a bit), I like to eat good food (probably more than is good for me), and I’m an avid runner and hiker. I’m a sports fan (currently in two fantasy football leagues), a caffeine addict (I’ve had at least one cup of coffee almost every day for the last fifteen or so years), and a book aficionado (currently re-reading the Stormlight Archive series before the next entry comes out). I fall on the left side of the current spectrum of American political parties (boy, do I wish we had a parliamentary system with more viable parties!), and I certainly have some core philosophical beliefs undergirding those specific political tendencies. Those beliefs are my starting place for any new topic I learn and think about. However, I try (pretty hard) to keep an open mind and re-evaluate my beliefs as I hear new evidence. I try especially not to hold opinions too strongly on topics that I don’t know much about, and I try to be honest about what I do and don’t know. In general, I would describe my frame as one of deep concern about the power of wealthy individuals and corporations to influence and corrupt society, where the government has a strong role to play in encouraging competition and in ensuring that everybody plays by the same rules, as well as in protecting civil rights. I believe that the world is complex, more complex than any individual can be expected to understand, and that the complexity is constantly growing. In such a world, I believe it becomes easier and easier for those with resources to engage in antisocial behavior and take advantage of everyone else around them. People need the government to provide tools and systems that enable them to thrive amid the complexity. I was struck recently when rewatching an episode of Parks and Recreation by this line, spoken by the character Ben Wyatt, which is a succinct summary of my frame: “A person should not have to have an advanced law degree to avoid being taken advantage of by a multibillion-dollar company.” That being said, the government has to be more or less functional for that principle to work in practice. In many cases, the various levels of government are actually remarkably good at doing this job, when you account for how much they do, and we in America take a lot for granted about our standard of living - it’s hard to imagine a life without heavy electricity use or, hell, access to clean water and indoor plumbing - but that’s no excuse for the myriad failures, inefficiencies, and missed opportunities. Honestly, I’m not actually sure how we’ve made it this far as a society. Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. What’s my plan for my writing? My primary goal here is to take thoughts that are stuck in my head and write them down (that’s sort of what a blog is by definition). For most of my life, I’ve had difficulty sleeping because I just can’t stop thinking, a problem that was at its worst during the first Trump presidency. It’s come back with a vengeance since the election, and I expect that to continue for the foreseeable future. I’d like to not spend the next four (God I hope it’s only four) years intensely sleep deprived, so I’m going to try writing and publishing thoughts, hopefully as a way to get them out of my head and to let me get some rest. My second goal is to figure out what I think and what I can do from here. I want to do what I can to fight back against the worst outcomes of Trump’s policies and rhetoric, to push the political tide more broadly back away from the looming threat of authoritarianism and toward a freer, fairer, and better world. I expect this to involve some specific work with local groups in my area, but I also think there are much bigger forces impacting those tides that can’t be addressed without broader action. Metaphorically, I want to help protect people from drowning in the tides by pulling them out of the water to safe ground and by building dams and levees, and I also want to blow up the moon so that the tides stop fucking drowning people in the first place*. It’s an apt metaphor because, while both are hard and important things to do, the first is clear and actionable while the second feels intangible and impossible. Where would I even begin? That’s what I’ll be writing here. My best attempts to understand the world around me and shape that knowledge into tools for building levees and blowing up the moon. I’m not going to restrict myself to any particular topics or types of articles, even if the subjects seem unrelated to each other; in fact, I firmly believe that there are a lot of connections between the areas that I’m generally interested in (software, politics, music, sports, etc) and I want to explore that in detail. Some broad areas that I know I’ll be thinking and writing about, among many others: What are organizations in my area that I can get involved with to help people in my community? How can I make it easier for like-minded people to get involved in their respective areas? How do you run an effective software engineering team? Especially within a larger context that is often out of your control? What does the future of software and technology look like? Are we on the path to AGI? How can left-leaning political forces take better control of the media and information ecosystem? How can we make the average person more engaged and better informed? How can government, at all levels, be more functional and responsive? I’m writing for myself above all else. I don’t expect to make a living off of this, so I don’t need to restrict my topics to make my blog easier to market. I plan to keep a fairly regular posting schedule (aiming for once a week), but that’s more for the effect it has on my mental health than for building an audience. I’m only publishing these blogs, to some degree, as accountability for myself. However, I’m also publishing these because I’m hopeful that exploring these topics might be useful to other people as a bridge from one of my areas of interest to another. I hope to help people in the world of politics and news gain a better understanding of technology (which is clearly needed, judging by the coverage of both crypto and AI over the last half decade). I would love if a software engineer who thinks of themself as “apolitical” started by reading a blog post here about Agile development or GraphQL and wound up on a post about unions or whether there’s any artistic value to music produced by AI tools. One specific answer I already believe to one of the questions above is that the left needs better funnels that take average people from non-political content into left-leaning content, something that is heavily used by the right in various online spaces**. This blog is me trying to build a funnel. If you’re reading this, it’s not too late. We can still fight to make the world a better place. Please feel free to reach out to me with questions or suggestions. If you disagree with something I’ve written, leave a comment and I’ll discuss - I want to make sure I have the best information and understanding I can. If you have a topic that you’re confused about, let me know and I might be able to write a post to help. If you have ideas for software tools that can help people in either of the ways I’ve described, please reach out and talk to me about building them - I can literally write the code, I can give some high-level thoughts on feasibility and directional advice, or anything in between. Let’s blow up the fucking moon. *No, this isn’t scientifically accurate, but it’s evocative. I have a degree in physics, so you don’t need to come yell at me about how actually the gravitational force of the sun also contributes significantly to the tides. **See here for one example