If you’ve been reading along lately, you picked up on the fact that last week was my last at Google. And this week was my first at FullStory.
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FullStory—I am here!
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Justin Owings, Googler [Deprecated]
It’s been a shade under seven years working here at Google in Atlanta; the longest I’ve worked anywhere. Today is my last day.
The expression “canary in a coal mine” originates from coal miners using canaries as a kind of early warning system. The miners would take the birds into the mine and periodically check-in on their status. The delicate canaries were more susceptible to gases like carbon monoxide, so if they suddenly stopped moving, miners would be […]
Channeling Clayton Christensen’s Jobs-to-be-done frame, I’ve started thinking about my daily default decisions. What is the job I need done by [fill-in the blank]? It’s a useful exercise.
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The System is Down
I read a book about five months back by John Gall called Systemantics: The Systems Bible. The book goes through a derived (by the author) set of principles or axioms about systems of all types, why they get created, how/why they don’t work, and much, much more.
My brother passed on an article in The New Yorker from a couple weeks back titled The Limits of Friendship. It’s an exposition on Oxford anthropologist Robin Dunbar’s discovery that humans organize into social groups that tend to range from 100-200 people, with the average—150—being an optimal rule of thumb. This is known as Dunbar’s number. The discovery was made […]
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Digitally isolated
It’s can’t be connection if it leaves you alone.
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What’s Lost in Outsourcing your Life?
David D. Friedman had a thought-provoking post over over the weekend — Middlemen, Specialization and Birthday Parties. Therein he talks about how specialization and division of labor have allowed for us to cheaply outsource various aspects of our lives that were formerly almost necessarily DIY. Below is an example I can relate to now that […]
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Iterating.
Core to the human experience is that we are alive. Living means we are in constant motion. We are dynamic and not static. That is the essence of human being. I am Justin Owings. People who know me would recognize me not having seen me in years. And while various affiliations and philosophies of mine have changed over the past […]
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Do. Observe. Honestly.
Someone will say: Yes, Socrates, but cannot you hold your tongue, and then you may go into a foreign city, and no one will interfere with you? Now I have great difficulty in making you understand my answer to this. For if I tell you that this would be a disobedience to a divine command, […]