Between Systems and Souls: Building, Breaking, and Becoming

In The King Must Die, by Kimi Ashing-Giwa, making taxation rounds at his older brother’s request is a task meant to keep Alekhai out of the palace so the Sovereign can rule for a few days without Alekhai breathing down his neck. It didn’t take long to figure out that a local chieftain has been pocketing most of the region’s yearly profits. Lounging on his personal lounge, Alekhai nurses a crystal glass of iced vodka.

There is a particularly raucus party after another of the Sovereign’s last two siblings meets their untimely death. The rebels take what little they can from their enemies. Sijara is separate in every sense of the word from the other young rebels.

Fen can’t stop seeing her newfound and newly lost friends dying around her. When Alekhai starts to address her, a low hollow rasp of a voice says, “Quiet or I’ll make it hurt.”

Some of the rebels will remain as they were. Fen’s mood worsens. The rebellion has died twice.

At a later point, Fen catches Mettan smothering a smile. They stumble off the right path one afternoon, and Fen grumbles that she hopes it doesn’t take all day.

When the revolutionary leader Kira had sat before her captor’s tent, the nipping wind remembered the taste and sting of hail and sleet. The windswept grasslands and sunbaked deserts had long been abandoned by the imperialists. The first time she cut out her own heart instead of giving up the fight she’d sacrificed her child for the cause.

When Fen tries to practice, the quarterstaff falls into the dirt for the twelfth time in as many minutes. A flat voice says, “That must hurt.” Dawn will arrive in a few hours.

Sijara asks Alekhai if he is certain that they are going the fastest way. He holds out the holographic map for her to inspect. Sijara assumes the location is where the first of Alekhai’s dead friends is.

In The Staff Engineer’s Path, Tanya Reilly points out that written values can be undermined by promotion decisions. There’s often a gap between stated culture and actual practice. Engineering goes beyond interacting with computer systems. Positive models a staff engineer should model are maturity, constructiveness, and accountability.

A staff engineer should resist the urge to take over tasks even when it would be faster. The true measure of career success as an engineer is whether other people want to work with you.

Key teaching opportunities can occur through formal training or withing regular work structures. The goal of teaching a system overview is to enable the student to be able to draw and describe the system to someone else. The staff engineer should let students lead by using tools themselves, typing commands, or working on their own laptop. In reverse shadowing, the student performs the task while the experienced person watched and gives feedback. The teacher should understand the context of whether the person is new to the technology or just needs a safety check.

In Time-Tripping Over You, by Brennon Lane, Silas watches the wild look in Jude’s eyes settle to something else—something sadder. Silas reaches for his hand out of impulse.

It takes Silas about an hour to log all the information in a notebook. He and Jude didn’t discuss exactly where Silas would be sleeping. Silas pulls a knitted gray blanket over his body and wiggles into a comfy spot on the sofa.

I worked most of the week of March 13 through March 20 on an integration beween Parade AI and DAT, replacing a direct integration that was due to expire that coming Friday. The original estimate was that it was going to take four hours, but in reality, it was more like five days, staying up late Wednesday night for final modifications and validation on Thursday.

On Saturday, March 21, I attended the Celebration of Life for Aere Greenway, a transgender friend of mine. She and her wife Deborah showed up at TDOR a few years ago, and provided the music for Danilynn’s Celebration of Life. Aere loved the outdoors, programming, and composing music—loves that she passed on to her children.

In Ordinary Grace, by William Kent Krueger, night is the dark of the soul. Frank intends to continue arguing with his brother. Their shadows glide before them as they walk to the garage door.

Frank can’t purchase any fireworks without his father being present. His father counters his mother’s conern about their safety with the argument that fireworks are a part of the culture of the Fourth of July celebration. Whenever a detonated cherry bomb or a string of firecrackers breaks the quiet in the neighborhood, his father’s face takes on an expression that is tense and watchful.

When Jake looks to Frank to help answer questions about what he experienced, Frank is only to happy to oblige. People are shocked that their most famous citizen tried to kill himself. Frank tells them that Mr. Brandt would have died had Jake come a few minutes later.

In Understanding Deep Learning: Building Machine Learning Systems with PyTorch and TensorFlow, by TransformaTech Institute, deep learning is presented as the engine behind many AI-innovations we take for granted. Neural networks are designed to mimic the way the human brain processes information. Tasks that were once thought to be exclusive to human intelligence are now made ideal by deep learning’s ability to improve with more data and computation.

Each layer plays a distinct role in processing data. In an image recognition task, the input layer for an image recognition task receives pixel values representing colors and intensities. The hidden layers contain neurons that perform weighted summations.

In language modeling tasks, RNNs process each word sequentially. In speech recognition tasks, they update their hidden state at each time step. In time-series prediction they update their hidden state to incorporate the latest information.

Graph Convolutional Networks use a layer-wise propagation rule that aggregates information from neighbors and scales it by the degree of each node. Graph Attention Networks can prioritize important relationships.

On Sunday, March 22, the Utah Stonewall Dems had their Oh No They Didn’t legislative review at Second Summit Hard Cider Company. The turnout was amazing with about 65 to 70 people in attendance. We raised close to $2,000 in sponsorships and donations, with half the money set aside for campaign contributions and the other half sdet aside for campaign school scholarships. Zach Angell worked incredibly hard catering the event and looking for sponsors. We are hoping that we can get more sponsors from the LGBTQ Chamber of Commerce over the year. We wound up having five panelists asked various questions by the Salt Lake County Party Chair Michele Rivera, and I made laminated pages of queer pioneers for each of the tables. In addition, we also had four baskets donated for fundraising, which saw fun participation as well.

On Saturday, March 28, I attended the opening reception of “Voices and Votes: Democracy in America” at the Utah Cultural Celebration Center. We heard presentations from the directors of the center, the mayor of West Valley City, and the woman who wrote an essay on the expansion of democracy that was available on site for free.

The exhibit was incredible, with campaign buttons going back to the nineteenth century, a history of the political memes—the donkey and the elephant, campaign marches, and a video by Rep Fitisemanu taking about the importance of being involved. There was even a small exhibit of how in the early 1980’s the people of Hunter, Granger, and Redwood districts voted to incorporate as a city. The incorporation came close to failing. It only passed by 72 votes.

Newspaper articles showed the Hunter-Granger Community Council packed at the time. Community councils were once the place where land-use changes were heard. The community council no longer exists. I think done right, if the city council would heed the voice of community councils, they would provide the voice of the community for the residents in their respective areas.

While there, I had an interesting talk with someone about religious interpretation. I told how I was raised Baptist, but over time evolved into an agnostic mystic humanist. The attributes are strongest from right-to-left. As a humanist, I believe what matters here and now is what really matters most of all. How we treat one another, and how we treat the planet and our future are my concernes. In my mind, there is no guarantee of a future realm. All we are guaranteed is what we have now. If we are not careful, we will lose it.

I am a mystic in the sense that I understand that there is something larger than myself, something that tends to forecast or guide or give a sense of what is happening in the world. I feel it. I connect to it, and I trust rationality combined with instincts. I feel some form of guiding force that wants me where I am.

This is where the agnostic comes in. It doesn’t mean that I’m atheist, nor does it mean that I am in any sense a deist. It means that to me it doesn’t really matter what the source of guidance is. I recognize that it might be a divine being or force, or it could be the space between the universe, the entire universe itself, the planet, all life on the planet, or just a sense of intuition processed through my amygdala. It doesn’t matter to me what the source is, as long as I do what is right that shows a genuine sense of caring, for both the planet and its inhabitants.

Over the last 50-plus years of my life, while archeologists have sought out proof of any of the events of Exodus and Genesis, they have found none. Instead, they have found evidence going back thousands of years of diverse gender identities and expressions in cultures all around the world who have honored them. That would not be possible if variant gender identities had not been with us from the very beginning.

When my friend told me that he believed that the universe was God, I told him I once ascribed to that theory before becoming agnostic. Sometimes, when I speak to the guiding force I refer to it as the Universe. I have also felt a feminine divine watching over me. What doesn’t matter to me is who you believe in so much as how it informs your actions. If you are not causing unnecessary harm or inflicting unnecessary suffering, and if your ethics lead us to compassion, respect, and sustainability, you are okay in my book.

If God is the Universe and everything in it, then everyone is a part of God, and when our bodies disintintegrate, they remain a part of God. This is why I want my body to be planted under a sapling when I die. I don’t want to destroy the proteins that took millions of years to evolve, or lock them in a casket. I want my body to decompose naturally and its components used to create new life. While my consciousness may be gone, those elements that leant it to me shall continue in one form or another. We are all stardust. We came from the stars, and we shall eventually return to the stars.

On Monday, March 30, I attended Politisauce at the Veridian Event Center, hosted by the Salt Lake County Democrats. There was a pretty large turnout and putting table numbers on the donation bags didn’t work out as planned. There was confusion with people trying to find their table, and one person told me she had bought an entire table and couldn’t find it. The executive committee needs to invest in the metal centerpieces that can hold cardstock with the table number on it, making it easy for people to scan the room and easily find their table.

Governor Katie Hobbs was the keynote speaker for the event, and she spoke of how she came up through the state from the minority party in a red state. She told how she has never lost a race, and how her race is being targeted by Trump. She spoke about how being true and having faith can help turn a red state blue.

The Republican party is in trouble. They are losing elections all over the country. The broken campaign promises, the unwanted war, the rising rate of essential services, and the unconstrained use of ICE are all having their toll.

Plans are starting to gear up for my trip to company headquarters in Dallas ahead of our company merger. I still don’t know what my promotion is going to look like. What I do know is that after a talk with my lead, we are going to try to establish me as the AI expert for the team. The goal is to meet with people when I get there—that I’m not going to go there to just be heads down coding.

When I asked him to clarify who my audience was going to be, he said that was for me to decide. Talk about awkward. I’m not used to picking my audience in the corporate world. I’m considering meeting with the leads to get an idea about where there pain points are with using AI to enhance their projects, and maybe identify a project that I can pitch to whoever I will be reporting to. Given the conversation, it sounds like I am going to have some form of increased autonomy and responsibility. I also can’t wait to meet with the vice presidents, if that’s on my agenda, to see how they operate as a team.

Also, people have been asking me to present again, so I have narrowed down an idea to talk about something that I’m experimenting with. The talk is going to be called “Smarter, Safer, Faster” AI, and I and going to be demonstrating how to use AI in an architecture-first way, in which design is intentional and involves the developer guiding the agent by doing something developers should already do. The idea is to have the developer analyze the codebase, decide what kinds of guiding design instructions to give the agent, and then add them to the ticket description.

The workflow will remember the steps and stop for developer feedback before and after every change. The point is to keep the developer responsible for the overall design of the code, and then let the agent automate the developer’s desires. It takes the AI-First approach of automation, forces human design guidelines before implementation and checks for technical debt before committing changes. It also adds a comment to the Jira ticket so QA can design white box tests and release teams don’t have to dive through the commits to figure out what changed.

We are also planning an AI hackathon at my company, and our team is going to look at ways to break apart our monolithic repository to reduce compile times to less that 45 minutes. The idea is to use AI to come up with a plan and a template that will speed the process. The net result is that by reducing the build times, unit tests will be run more often, and code will be built and deployed faster, freeing up infrastructure and developer machines to get more done.

We are also planning an AI hackathon at my company, and our team is going to look at ways to break apart our monolithic repository to reduce compile times to less that 45 minutes. The idea is to use AI to come up with a plan and a template that will speed the process. The net result is that by reducing the build times, unit tests will be run more often, and code will be built and deployed faster, freeing up infrastructure and developer machines to get more done.

Across stories of rebellion and resilience, lines of code and lines of belief, one truth keeps resurfacing: what we build—whether systems, communities, or ourselves—matters most when it is rooted in intention and care. The same discipline that guides a staff engineer toward clarity and accountability can guide a life toward compassion and purpose. We are, all of us, constantly iterating—learning from failure, refining our direction, and choosing, again and again, to show up with integrity. So wherever you stand—at the edge of uncertainty, in the middle of change, or on the brink of something new—choose to build something that makes others’ lives better. Lead with curiosity. Act with courage. And remember: even the smallest, most deliberate act can ripple outward, shaping a future more just, more thoughtful, and more profoundly human.