A long pause

Working at AWS is very different to working at smaller mission-driven companies like Mozilla.

Even in projects where I get to think or work in the open, there is policy around communication that has a chilling effect on writing, as well as cultural pressure to use my time to write more leveraged blog posts to serve the interests of the team. That means I don’t write here.

This culture is in stark contrast to my pieces on Medium from 2018, my last year at Mozilla, in which I wrote to explain — and wrote to think through! — two problems with which I have grappled for long stretches of my career: how different groups of people (individuals, teams, or even communities) can reuse information that overlaps in space and vocabulary; and how different devices can change shared data over time and space without the need for heavyweight central coordination.

The AWS blog certainly attracts more readers than this little Medium, but it doesn’t serve those purposes of explaining and thinking through problems.

In occasional bursts of free time I return to the topic of structured storage, whether by writing index chunk join code to understand an algorithm, or more recently by digging into an identity challenge that is intrinsically decentralized, only to find JSON-LD (RDF in disguise!) hiding under the covers. Writing prose for public consumption, however, has fallen by the wayside.

I’ll be back when things change.