An autodidact at heart, I’m curious and eager to seek out new knowledge wherever I go! I hold a positive yet skeptical perspective of the world. Constantly searching for, appreciating, and amplifying the wisdom of those around me is a process that excites me every day.
Areas of Interest: self-development, entrepreneurship, virtual & augmented reality, open source software/hardware development, site reliability engineering, decentralised autonomous organizations, brain machine interfacing, travel, hiking/backpacking, science, photography, stoicism, & music.
Resources & Influences
A myriad of personalities & ideals have inspired my perspective. Though I may not align with all of the opinions/beliefs of those listed below, I have found the following resources valuable:
Marcus Aurelius
Meditations: A New Translation
"The impediment to action, advances action. What stands in the way, becomes the way."
"Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth."
Kevin Rose
Kevin has put effort into an amazing lineup of interviews with inspiring entrepreneurs spanning the likes of: Jack Dorsey of Twitter & Square, Kevin Systrom of Instagram, Elon Musk of Tesla & SpaceX, Tony Hsieh of Zappos, Ev Williams of Medium, Brian Armstrong of Coinbase.
Bill Nye
Bill continues to be a huge inspiration; starting first in my childhood, this respectable figurehead of science education has inspired countless lives to question and be curious about the beautiful nature of reality.
Derek Sivers
“To me, ‘busy’ implies that the person is out of control of their life.”
Derek Sivers on Developing Confidence, Finding Happiness, and Saying “No” to Millions
“What do you believe that other people think is insane?”
Derek's blog and books are excellent ways to shake up your perspective on what's important in life: sive.rs
Epictetus
The Complete Works of Epictetus
"It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters."
"The key is to keep company only with people who uplift you, whose presence calls forth your best."
Brian Cox
Like Carl Sagan, Brian has taken a public stance in presenting science education in a delightful way; I recommend you check out his BBC specials: Human Universe, Wonders of Life, Wonders of the Universe, and more
Jason Fried
Founder & CEO at Basecamp. Co-author of Getting Real, Remote, and NYT Bestseller REWORK.
I loved this talk @ CreativeMornings: Reworking the way we work.
Gene Kim
Gene Kim is an award winning CTO, researcher and author of The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win as well as co-author of The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations
Jane McGonigal
Jane is an game designer and author who advocates the use of mobile and digital technology to channel positive attitudes and collaboration in a real world context.
Jim Carrey
The man needs no introduction; beyond his talents in making the masses laugh I implore you to discover some of his life philosophy that he shares during the graduation speech below:
Jim Carrey's Commencement Address at the 2014 MUM Graduation
Seneca
"...we suffer more in imagination than in reality."
"Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body."
Brendan Gregg
A kernel and performance engineer who has worked at Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Joyent, Netflix, and currently acting as a Fellow at Intel. His perfomance analysis methodologies (The USE and TSA methods) are certainly worth reviewing. His blog is packed full of helpful resources that any unix admin would find useful.
Naval Ravikant
Sage advice from Naval about habits and beliefs needed to approach startups and life in a healthy manner.
On Happiness, Reducing Anxiety, and Crypto Strategy
A collection of Naval's wisdom currated from Twitter, Podcasts,and Essays over the past decade.
Chris Sacca
Chris providing a commencement address at the Carlson School of Management.
Chris on The Tim Ferris Podcast: Episode 1, Episode 2
Richard Feynman
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool."
"Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which 'are' there."
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character)
Carl Sagan
"We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever."
"Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of A Pale Blue Dot. "
Seth Godin
Serial author, blogger, entreprenuer, and marketing "guru" (guru being a little derogatory, he surpasses that term).
His blog is full useful info, or checkout any of his 20 publications.
Simon Sinek
"Corporate culture matters. How management chooses to treat its people impacts everything - for better or for worse."
How Great Leaders Inspire Action
The Infinite Game - conversation with Tom Bilyeu of Impact Theory
Tim Ferris
The Tim Ferris Show is an invaluable assortment of interviews with proven high performers, where he comfortably extracts valuable lessons and anecdotes.
Brian Johnson
Brian Johnson has distilled the wisdom of over 600 books into practical lessons that allow self-directed individuals to better their own way of life. Being a member of the Optimize community and absorbing all of the aggregated content on health, positive psychology, mindfullness, meditation, exercise, and more has been a great boom to my life.
Kelly McGonigal
Kelly is a health psychologist and lecturer at Standard who has written some excellent publications: The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It, The Upside of Stress: Why Stress Is Good for You, and How to Get Good at It, and The Joy of Movement: How exercise helps up find happiness, hope, connection, and courage
I would also recommend that you check out her TED talk: How to make stress your friend.
Janine Benyus
Through the concept of biomimicry Janine has driven engineers, inventors, and designers to look towards nature to be inspired by biological systems that have been solving challenging problems for millions of years.
Janine's TED talk: Biomimicry in action
William Ury
William Ury, negotiations expert and author sits down with Simon Sinek: Start With Yourself
Adam Jacob
CEO of The System Initiative. Former CTO and co-founder of Opscode, Adam has 20 years of technical experience spanning system administration, systems engineering, and leading the implementation of technicial innovation for high performing organizations.
Adrian Cockroft
As a former Cloud Architect for Netflix, Adrian played a key role in their migration to a "cloud native" architecture, and the open sourcing of the widely used NetflixOSS platform. Clearly a thought leader and public advocate for cloud native architecture, he now acts as VP for AWS.
Daniel Pink
Dan has authored a several publications that revolve around practical uses of behaviorial science in business.
A great animated synopsis of Dan's book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by RSA Animate.
Dan's TED talk on Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
Bridget Kromhout
Known as a major organizer for DevOpsDays , Bridget actively speaks on the conference circuit and can be found talking online as a co-host on Arrested DevOps.
Arrested DevOps ep. 92 - Bridget with Jez Humble titled "CI, CD, Oh My"
Jonah Horowitz
Previously a service reliability architect at Netflix, and currently a Site Reliability Engineering manager at Apple, Jonah has shared multiple nuggets of wisdom with the reliability community which I find worthy of sharing, such as: Configuration Management is an antipattern
David Attenborough
A widely known naturalist who is found narating a slew successful natural history programs such as: Life On Earth, The Living Planet, The Trials Of Life, The Blue Planet and Planet Earth. I sincerely appreciate his life's dedication to improving society's awareness of our natural world.
Kolton Andrus
Kolton is the founder and CEO of Gremlin Inc , a chaos engineering platform for performing fault injection to improve system resiliency.
I recommend that you checkout his podcast episode with Software Engineering Daily here: Failure Injection with Kolton Andrus
Applying Failure Testing Research at Netflix with Peter Alvaro.
Peter Attia
Peter's The Drive podcast hosts an array of intellegible experts on various health topics that contribute to longevity, and overall well-being. His no-nonsense and skeptical perspective is vastly underated in a would of hype and psuedo-science. Do yourself a favor and pick out an episode at random, practically ever episode is worth your time.
Adam Grant
Adam Grant has been Wharton’s top-rated professor for 7 straight years. As an organizational psychologist, he is a leading expert on how we can find motivation and meaning, and live more generous and creative lives.
Adam's podcast Work Life
Publications: Originals, Give and Take, and more...
Marc Andreessen
Co-author of Mosaic and co-founder of Netscape, Marc's ties to the beginning of the internet boom are undeniable.
As a co-founder and general partner of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) his influence on the world of startups and technology movements continues.
The a16z podcast network and blog are awesome resources for keeping a pulse on emerging trends.
Ben Horowitz
Co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) his leadership experience and blunt perspective on operations is a rare yet genuine view on business.
The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture
James Clear
Author of the best selling book: Atomic Habits , James has also produced a wealth of useful articles on his blog jamesclear.com which revolves around productivity, creativity, motivation, self-improvement, focus, and as you may have guessed, habit formation.
Adam Savage
A special effects designer, fabricator, and TV personality usually known for co-hosting MythBusters. His eccentric enthusiasm around creative maker culture is quite energizing. Every Tool's a Hammer: Life Is What You Make It