systemsnull
Pixel-art Lisa lounging in a chair by a starship viewport, drink in hand

About

I’m drawn to systems for the same reason in every field I’ve worked in: small, granular, almost atomic changes that interact until they shift something at the macro level, and then feed back on themselves. A few molecules of a hormone bind a receptor, a gene switches on, a behaviour changes, and the behaviour changes the hormone. One mutation survives a round of selection, and a few generations later a genetic algorithm’s whole population has converged on a solution no individual was designed to find; a swarm of agents each following a handful of local rules ends up behaving like something with a plan. A price moves, and the move becomes information that moves it again. Some of those loops are positive and run away with themselves; some are negative and hold everything steady; most real systems are a tangle of both.

What fascinates me is that these systems are semi-deterministic and have no agency at all. A cascading hormone system is exactly as agnostic about itself as a genetic algorithm or a change in a stock price: none of them wants anything or knows what it’s doing, and yet what they produce is structured enough that you can learn to read it, and sometimes to anticipate it.

Pixel-art Lisa kneeling with a wrench, fixing a small device

That started in neuroendocrinology, in circadian and behavioural endocrinology labs, and it’s the same lens I bring to data engineering. Now AI agents are doing it too, at the intersection of economics, user dynamics, and psychology. Lately I’ve been engaging a lot with Benjamin Bratton’s The Stack and digital topologies in this vein, and with data sovereignty as a consequence. It’s why this blog wanders between hormones, Spark internals, and who funds AI research: to me they’re the same kind of question.

I’m a huge believer in open source. I think it’s the future, and it’s already the core of the technical systems that run our entire world. I’ve been a Linux fan for a long time, Ubuntu especially, despite the flak that’s earned me from Arch users.

Hand-drawn Tux the penguin, eyes narrowed smugly, holding up an Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa install disc
Unrepentant.

I also game on Linux, and I’m excited about the latest Proton developments. I love RPGs like Mass Effect and Dragon Age, and science fiction like Star Trek, which you may have already guessed from the LCARS panels framing this page.

Pixel-art Lisa on a couch with a game controller, under neon HIGH SCORE and LEVEL UP signs

I love Pre-Raphaelite art, and my favourite painter of all time is John Singer Sargent. I love his use of colour and his approaches to portraiture, unorthodox for their time. On a fun side note, I used to be a caricaturist.

Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose by John Singer Sargent: two young girls in white dresses lighting paper lanterns at dusk in a garden full of lilies and roses
John Singer Sargent, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (1885-86). Tate, London.

Today I work in DevRel at Databricks on the open source team, which is a dream job for me. It’s exciting and amazing to work with such smart, incredibly hardworking people who have been part of this community for so long.

Elsewhere

Opinions here are my own and do not reflect the views of my employer.