Good Software Is Anti-Fragile
Antifragility is
a property of systems in which they increase in capability to thrive as a result of stressors, shocks, volatility, noise, mistakes, faults, attacks, or failures. The concept was developed by
Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book, Antifragile, and in technical papers.
The concept of antifragile is the opposite of the fragile!
A fragile thing such as a package of wine glasses is easily broken when dropped but an antifragile object would benefit from such stress. So rather than marking such a box with "Handle with Care", it would be labelled "Please Mishandle" and the wine would get better with each drop (would be awesome wouldn't it).
My goal is to be anti-fragile in the work I do and in life. Unfortunately I was near-fatally hit by a car while cycling home from work in 2016. That has left me with chronic pain and acutely aware of how fragile life is.
The purpose of this site is four-fold:
- Keep track of lessons learned for a quicker/easier place to reference those lessons in the future. By writing the lessons down I hope to cement the knowledge and reduce time spent relearning.
- Record professional development for future reference.
- Keep track of professional development reading to cement knowledge and leverage.
- Build/control my online brand/identity.
Why the URL?
amorphousprojects.com
A few years ago I started a technology company. The 3 products planned were all related to insurance and risk management but eventually I wanted to develop many more ideas, not necessarily risk management specific. So, I called the company amorphous_projects because I felt that accurately described the plan for the company. Unfortunately I fell victim to perfectionism and was unable to release a MVP.
anti-fragile.io
I got really sick of trying to spell out amorphousprojects.com over the phone. So, I registered a shorter, easier to understand domain. I'm now, slowly, in the process of moving everything to the new domain.
I fancy myself a bit of a photographer, by no means in the professional sense of photography. I'm keen to collect life experiences, rather than money or things, since my near-fatal crash and photos allow me to collect & remember those experiences.
See the photos here »
Things I'm Building
A project intended to help with missing loved ones and to keep people safe. I have big plans around crowdsourcing community data, bus drivers, train staff, etc to find missing people faster and before they die.
I got tired of the awkward 'Wait, how do you spell your username?' dance when meeting people out, so I built Connect-Us.app. It's a clean, frictionless web app that lets me share my contact info and social links via instant QR codes. No clunky typing, no 'let me call you so you have my number', just a quick scan and we're connected. It started as a personal fix for social friction and turned into a fun project in making real-life interactions a little smoother.
I built Lakebed.io, a lightweight and highly secure data management platform designed to challenge clunky cloud-storage monopolies. It allows companies to easily centralize, clean, and organize massive amounts of data from IoT devices, file uploads, and APIs without writing a single line of code. I wanted to build something incredibly robust on the backend, yet so user-friendly on the frontend that anyone can drop a file in and instantly see a 360-degree visualization of their business.
LOL, it took all of 1 day to register the domain, setup HTTPS and release a landing page. But this is the one that's going to be really [REALLY] successful, I swear!
Basically, my current employer and multiple previous employers, and many others have told me they need to guide their staff in their daily tasks. They need org-specific help content in general-user web-apps where they cannot control the help content. Its pretty easy to do with GreaseMonkey to TamperMonkey, but you need to be able to write code and you need to convince all staff to set up the plugin in the same way. Instead, this app is 1 plugin, a central repository of help content, and easy setup with just your company email.