On Mozart’s Requièm

I just came back from listening to Mozart’s Requièm, played by my University’s youth orchestra.

Mozart’s Requièm in E minor (K.626) consists of fourteen movements. With its beautiful violins, hauntingly harmonic vocal parts, and sublime melodic line, Lacrimosa (Tears Day) is by far my favorite one. Just listen to it.

There is something innately beautiful in this music for the death. Mozart–and his pupile Franz Xaver Süssmayer, who completed the piece after Mozart’s death–gently carries you from one mood to the other. From grief to optimism, passing through rage and remorse, the Requièm forces you to contemplate your life, and eventual death, assessing what it is that is important for you.

It is only fitting that our fear of the unknown, our will to trascend life, to keep on living when our bodies cannot, our human condition, produced such a beautiful composition. Religion, poems, and orchestral pieces are exquisite manifestations of our mortal fear.

Humanity is a magnificent race. Taxonomically speaking. And Mozart is a badass.

On Academics as Politicians

Six days ago I attended a conference given by the Colombian Architect Alejandro Echaverri, responsible for some of the infrastructure projects known as “Library-Parks” that are known as the Medellín Model.

Alejandro Echeverri at Tecnológico de Monterrey

These library-parks are open public spaces that seek to reclaim the city for its citizens. Equipped with educational museums, libraries and technology centers, these parks were built to reconnect a city divided by the orography, the social and the economic differences of its inhabitants.

The architects tackled the problem thinking that if they were able to rebuild the city in an open, communicated, and equipped way, their citizens would be able to rebuild the social tissue that had been so scarred because of inequality, drug cartels, and violence.

With high-quality urbanistic projects, Medellín started to turn into a completely different city. Their citizens went from having spaces that even the police could not enter to occupaying them for family gatherings. These parks serve as a meeting point between the worlds of the extremely wealthy and the extremely poor.

The Medellín Model is so powerful because change was achieved through image, redefining the street as a project. The collective mindset changed as spaces were opened, renovated, and made attractive. The people approached their city with gusto. Violence went down, significantly.

These architects were able to show that cynicism could be overcome through hard work and collaboration. It was not the government who was providing these spaces, it was the people of Medellín who were rebuilding their city through government resources.

Library Park España in Medellín

Similarly, Bogotá experienced a foreceful transformation through their mayors Antanas Mokus and Enrique Peñalosa. Bogotá changed thanks to the power of symbolic actions: drivers showed a thumbs up card to good drivers and a thumbs down card to bad ones; mimes mocked people who did not respect transit rules; Mockus, dressed as superhero, removed trash from the streets; bicycle lanes were given the same importance as car lanes; the downtown area, once taken by criminals, was fully renovated and made accessible to everyone.

For a much more thorough overview of how Bogotá changed, watch this documentary.

Colombia demonstrated that our cities need not be as chaotic and Gotham-like as they sometimes are. The assault on politics by these academics is inspiring to say the least.

Let’s all remember that the way we approach the events in our lives, the light we choose to cast them in, can define our moods and the behavior of the people around us.

“Live high, live mighty, live righteously.” – Mraz

On Having a Purpose

Reading España Invertebrada by Ortega y Gasset, I was fascinated by how Spain became a nation. The Kingdom of Castille was the one kingdom that was able to impose a single “central energy” which invited the newly incorporated factions to live as “parts of a nation and not nations apart”.

Listening to President Obama’s reelection speech tonight, I can only say that I wish the USA the best, and that I wish that we had so strong leadership and ideals back home, in Mexico.

I leave you with my favorite quote from the night:

“I believe we can keep the promise of our founders, the idea that if you’re willing to work hard, it doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from or what you look like or where you love. It doesn’t matter whether you’re black or white or Hispanic or Asian or Native American or young or old or rich or poor, able, disabled, gay or straight, you can make it here in America if you’re willing to try.

I believe we can seize this future together because we are not as divided as our politics suggests. We’re not as cynical as the pundits believe. We are greater than the sum of our individual ambitions, and we remain more than a collection of red states and blue states. We are and forever will be the United States of America.”

On Privacy Economics

* This post was co-written with my friend Salman Salamatian, a brilliant guy I met while I was in Pittsburgh and who worked at Technicolor this summer.

Or do you not think so far ahead, ’cause I’ve been thinking about forever? – Frank Ocean

The words, actions and thoughts of famous people are always scrutinized in ridiculous ways. The idea of the perfect person, the perfect Audrey Hepburn or the always cool Steve McQueen, more often than not exists only in the collective mind of society.

After becoming famous and important, whether people are politicians, actors, or Internet superstars, they become branding experts, thought curators of their own minds. No sentence goes unexamined, no bad deed unheard of, and no private conversation is ever really private again. Publicists are hired, and PR firms become a necessity.

However, all of these people get scrutinized mostly after they know they will be. As of yet, no presidential candidate has had his entire life up in a Facebook profile. None has had his late drunken 22-year-old tweets examined. I even wonder if political parties will discriminate against the very existence of a digital record of one’s life in the future. Maybe we will abandon the expectation of immaculately perfect individuals instead.

Not to play Captain Obvious here, but we must then be very thoughtful of what we post online. I believe few people have realized that someday our grandchildren may try to unbury all of our digital records, examining every single “like”, comment, or email we ever had. Thus, we should become curators from the very beginning, lest we regret it later on.

1. tl;dr – Most people are not aware that they are sharing too much information

Some people think that we should stop whining and come to the realization that privacy is dead. Luis von Ahn, for example, is vocal about privacy being a creation of the 20th century. Before the concentration of people in big cities, everyone in the village knew about you and your activities. It was the amount of people in big urban centers that gave the illusion of privacy; your actions became insignificant there. Therefore, the digital revolution is only taking us back to our past situation.

We, however, do not buy that idea. At least not right now. It will be a while until people lower their expectations, and the transition will always involve a lot of whining. Furthermore, if people demand privacy, privacy they shall receive; users should not adapt to us, we should adapt to users.

2. tl;dr – Privacy was a child of the 20th century; get used to not having it. Maybe.

This transparency in our lives is enabled by the systems the software industry creates. Our decisions as engineers to log the user’s activities for a period of time are important. With the rise of scrutiny against regular people’s lives by recruiters, school admission committees, and possible dates, the question of privacy in our online activities is regularly discussed.

For engineers, the issue is how to treat privacy in the systems we build, even if it’s just for a transition period.

For this, we must ask: what is privacy? We believe that it is not only the ability to hide information from people, but the ability to fairly use it. We don’t even really control what information we hide from whom in real life: whenever we share anything with anyone, we are trusting that person not to go and broadcast it to the world.

3. tl;dr – Privacy is not the ability to hide information, but the ability to fairly [re]use it.

Now, there is a big, nasty misconception between data and information. Data and information are two completely different things. To understand privacy, it is really important to understand how these two concepts relate.

What we reveal to our Facebook friends and fellow tweeters is not information; it is data. Whether or not this data becomes information is a different question.

We, however, tend to forget this distinction, simply because our subconscious does a heck of a job at transforming data into information. We see samples of data and we build a complex model of correlations to gather information from them. Thus, we suppose: eating deals with hunger, people that drive Ferraris are rich, and two protuberances in the chest are good indicators of a female. We are always building cause-effect correlations, and we never notice it.

Does this picture reveal any information to you?

It’s just data, isn’t it? In order for us to understand it, we must be acquainted with the work of Rene Magritte.

Thus,

information = data + metadata

That is, information is data in context (which engineers sometimes call metadata). Hiding context–identities, location, and etcetera–could be a sure-fire way of sharing data without revealing context. This, however, is a technical problem, a Very Hard Problem.

So, when we build privacy into our systems, it is not really about protecting what our users share (data), but about allowing information to be used fairly. Now, of course, the real challenge for us is to be able to differentiate between data and fair use of information.

4. tl;dr – Information is data in context. Data itself is not relevant. As engineers, we should care about protecting the use of information.

Since differentiating data from information is a hard technical problem and a long philosophical discussion, is the best way to manage privacy in our systems a technological one then? Or could we turn to, say, Economics?

In order to manage anything, one should first determine two things:

1. What is it that you are managing? – Fair use of information
2. How do you know if you are managing it well? – By assuring that whoever is disclosing information receives fair compensation for it

Now, we must define what fair compensation is, and in order to do so, we should come up with a way to value information consistently: all economic players must agree on these valuations.

Now, valuing information is also a Very Hard Problem. We could, for example, report the estimated impact of disclosing information in our daily lives. With enough samples, we should be able to set a price to different types of information. This is a very simple proposition, and one that shrewd players would easily take advantage of. Given that our area of expertise is not Economics, we will leave this problem to the economists for now.

For the sake of this post, however, assume that such valuations exist. We should, then, build software systems that do not seek to hide information, but that make economically sound use of that information.

Let’s walk through a scenario from a Privacy-Economics-aware Facebook:

1. Mary gives her work information history to Facebook
2. Facebook uses that information to allow recruiters to target Mary for job positions
3. Recruiters contact Mary through a one-time-use channel in order to offer relevant positions
4. Facebook gets k dollars for facilitating the information from Mary to the recruiters
5. Mary receives free service from Facebook for N months (valued k dollars)

Here, fair use of information is managed via a one-time-use channel for communicating information, but fair use could also be achieved by other means, like information tracking. Information tracking would seek to limit how users redistribute information. Because of technical difficulties, information tracking, or access control techniques, have been unsuccessful in the past (DRM anyone?). We, however, do believe that it is possible to create nice implementations of this solution, given that it would benefit most people.

5. tl;dr – We should consider creating a microeconomics system to control the privacy of information. This system would rely on correctly assessing the value of any piece of information and providing means for fair transactions.

However we implement our systems, the point is that, as engineers, we should think of privacy as fair use of information from an economical standpoint and not from a purely technical one. Engineers should look at privacy from two different standpoints:

1. How do we reveal data without revealing information?
2. How do we use (monetize) information in a fair way?

This take on information and privacy would:

• allow companies to know how much they can expect to monetize information for.
• allow companies to understand how to incentivize or disincentivize certain uses of their platform.
• allow users to be responsible about what they share, knowing the benefits or damages they will receive by disclosing information.
• make users aware of the need to be active curators from the very beginning.

Privacy in software systems as we have experienced it so far is a lost cause. We need ways to force the disclosure of private information for certain very specific things (medical information is the best example), and for the rest, make information worth distributing. Otherwise, companies will just make money off our backs and we will have more and more of those stories about people getting fired because of pictures they posted on social networks.

Until we build this next Privacy Economy, be mindful about your data.

6. tl;dr – A Privacy Economy would be a Nice Thing to Have. As engineers, we should strive to build it and lay the foundations in our systems to incentivize it.

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The xx & Microsoft

The xx & Microsoft

This might be one of the coolest things I’ve seen a band do to release an album.

Track the spread of the music as it is shared around the world.

On Managing Corporations: Could Microsoft become Valve? Could Valve become Microsoft?

Regarding the article written by Yanis Varoufakis on Why Valve? Or, what do we need corporations for and how does Valve’s management structure fit into today’s corporate world?, there are some thoughts that I would like to express, as I feel that hyperbole and generalization on the part of a writer, although thought-provoking and appealing, are generally irresponsible to the reader if the other part of the argument is not explored.

Go read the great article, but to summarize, Varoufakis describes the way Valve is run as a corporation, with its flat-hierarchy and no-boss culture, where employees are free to move their desks to go work on whatever project they are interested in. In a sense, he describes, corporations are usually directed by the decisions of a small group, in contradiction with the spirit of free markets, where people decide what they do based on signals received by the market. Valve adjusts to this latter spirit by democratizing the direction of the company thanks to the “interest signals” that employees create by telling each other what they are working on and what they find interesting.

This got me thinking on how such a structure would work in a big company, one the size of Microsoft, Google or Apple. As the author suggests, and as Valve leaders fear, the model might not scale.

My view on this is that it indeed will not scale. This utopia is beautiful and possible in small projects, but it breaks down on the larger scale. Would Microsoft or Google or Apple employees stay doing their jobs if they were free to move to whatever their passion dictated? Is there anyone at Microsoft who feels passionate about supporting Windows XP after 10 years of its release?

It seems to me that a lot of these jobs would not survive. Sure, creating games and putting them out there is so fun that the guys at Valve will do whatever it takes to delight people, but corporate users do not demand interesting novel material all the time. They value consistency and support, which comes from repetition and maintenance on the part of companies. I do not have numbers from which to prove this, but I would say that in the software industry everyone and their moms want to be innovative. Let´s say, for the sake of argument, that 95% of the people want to innovate and will take the chance to work on exciting next-generation projects if given the chance, and the other 5% is content with supporting old systems. If only that 5% of people were to support and maintain past-generation systems, customers would have a helluva hard time enjoying computer systems!

If we take Apple as an example, it was precisely the dictator-like approach that Steve Jobs had to directing the company that made the vision of the company so evident to employees and the execution of their projects so successful. It seems to me that if we left big problems to the whim of a large group of people, we would end up with sloppy all-patched-up solutions. Some problems are so big and complex by definition, that without a clear goal set by a few group of people, their solution would be impossible. Just go build Windows on that flat-hierarchy structure! I dare you! I would love to see a Windows 8 built by group consensus.

In short, yes, the Valve way of managing, or not managing, a corporation is very appealing; it’s very hip. But it will never build multibillion-dollar Fortune 500 companies. Maybe Microsoft would end up splitting in several hundred corporations, but the ecosystem, the Microsoft platform, or the Google platform, or the Apple family of products, would never exist without a top-down management system. Would Valve ever be able to keep creating anything as good as they create now were it to develop its own console, its own mobile OS, its own database system, its own multimedia platform, its own peripherals, its own cloud platform, its own desktop OS, and its own etcetera in a completely flat structure?

Maybe if a collective created a vision for everyone throughout the company, much like the Valve Handbook for New Employees does, would a company that big be able to get Microsoft-big. But that is precisely the role of the board of directors in a big company! I would love to know how often an average person changes projects in Valve versus how often an average person stays in the same team at Microsoft. Maybe the end result is not that different after all?

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On Overachievers

This has been bothering me for the past few weeks.

I recently read this piece on The New York Times: The ‘Busy’ Trap. Go ahead, read it. The content will seat here, waiting. The piece is worth it, I promise.

And then I see videos like this, which in a very eloquent, lyrically beautiful fashion capture what being a man is:

Well, I believe I am trapped in this ‘busy trap’. The software industry is a great place to be in. There is immense growth. There are billions to be made overnight. There is a lot of great engineering and science in place. It’s a cozy and rewarding place to be in. And I love it. But it traps you. Company founders work 18 hours a day, and college life is not that different for tech students. However much we mock them, those wine-drinking nude-model painters surely seem to live a happier life.

How different is it really to work on the industry as an entry level engineer or as a Senior Principal Engineer Career-Incredible Architect Lead (S.P.E.C.I.A.L.)? Yes, responsibility is different, tasks are different, and the pay at big software companies is also substantially different, but the mindset required to get the job done is the same. The daily rush from seeing code compile as an entry level engineer might even be better than just getting the achievement of completing a project as a S.P.E.C.I.A.L. The grease on your hands smells better than the ink on your wrists. The pay for either title can easily support you and your family. And yet, almost everyone you talk to wants to climb high up the ranks. Everyone at the big companies complain that no matter what kind of results they achieve, they will never zucker Berg; he is the founder of the company!

So what then accounts for the insatiable nature of men? Is it in his nature? Maybe some psychologist could chime in with the latest theory on this. Is it the recognition of achievement?

The point is that I know that I am trapped in this feedback loop of overachieving. I am a workaholic. Everyone around me is, and we validate each other. Each one of us makes the others more competitive. We want to eat the world in days, and because of software, we are mostly able to do it. I still do not entirely understand why we do it, though.

It could be a matter of age. Everyone at a young age might swing for the fences, whatever the reason. While a few of them make it to the big leagues, the others settle and are left to enjoy whatever they have after their attempts, be it family or solitude. Recently, an exec in the industry was asked how he balanced work and personal life. His answer made everyone in the public chuckle: “What balance?”. The rumpus caused by a Facebook exec for admitting to leave work at 5 is a perfect example of where the industry stands.

It, then, becomes a matter of wisdom: you have to know when the payoff is not longer paying off so that you can hit the breaks soon enough to start being what Anis thinks a man is, to pursue other things besides career development. Go as fast as you can while you are young and learn to slow down as you get tired or priorities change. It would be awful to become the dad who is considered to be quite successful but is never home.

It could also be I have not found what I want to fully throw myself at.

Let wisdom be on my side.

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On Sharing

The few who knew what might be learned,
Foolish enough to put their whole heart on show,
And reveal their feelings to the crowd below,
Mankind has always crucified and burned.

Faust to Wagner

On Worthwhile Endeavours*

*It is very difficult to talk in extremes, so I beg for your patience. This post reflects my belief on what it is worthwhile for me and the majority of the population to work on.

If a tree falls in the middle of the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it freakin’ matter?

Three semesters ago I took a class called Philosophy of Science. This class describes what the definition of science is, studying the texts of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Popper, Thomas Khun, Imre Lakatos, and Paul Feyerabend, amongst others. For those not versed on their work, these outstanding individuals made brilliant arguments on what it is that science is and how one should conduct the business of science. Their work also relates to the study of how science has been done in historical terms, History of Science.

It was a very entertaining class that gave me ample time to think and reflect on how one should do research, what type of knowledge I value, and how I want to spend my time working. Related to this kind of thought, I recently finished reading ‘Surely you are joking Mr. Feynman’, a compilation of stories on my hero Richard Feynman. His view on life, his passion for physics, and his quest to discover the inherent beauty of nature is something that I find deeply appealing. Inspiring really.

Philosophical discussions make for great drunken passionate conversations. I sometimes gather with friends on Thursday nights for a session of “grababeerandgetmeone pseudo-discussion”, as a great friend of mine likes to call them. We discuss politics, religion, sociology, music, and etcetera. However, it is this discussional nature of philosophy that bothers me.

You see, I do not question its value. It teaches us to question and double-question assumptions, to come up with witty arguments and even wittier rebutals. It helps us discover –construct?– our deepest values, and it lets us justify whatever behavior we want to get away with. It is fun. It is interesting. It is necessary. But it is not practical. What I mean is that it does not yield concrete products or services. It does not build spaceships, electric vehicles, or electronic payment platforms (Elon Musk, seriously, WTF?). Its seductive discourse makes brilliant individuals argue for millenia, without arriving to any definitive answer.

Because of its unquestionable benefits, philosophy should be taught in 1 or 2 classes in every University, regardless of major, but it should not become a major career path. Not for most people, at least. I have talked to some engineering or science students who after taking a class in philosophy become so enamored with it that they spend months sitting in chairs massaging their beards. It is certainly not time ‘wasted’, but it is not the best use of it.

The same logic applies to most types of knowledge. Discussions on religion, the pitfalls of democracy, human nature, and etcetera, build beliefs and cement ways of thinking, but should not become the subject of one’s work. They should shape how we do work, but after getting acquinted with the different views on these topics, one should spend very little time thinking of them, in hopes that with enough people doing this, we all focus in more worthwhile endeavours.

In short, learn philosophy, love it, discuss it, and get it over with. Instead, build, ship, and deliver. Philosophy and related areas let us dream; dreams lead to doing, and doing leads to progress. The key step, though, is doing.

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On Personal Branding

I am in the middle of my second internship at Microsoft and wanted to write this first post on some things that I have learned or realized recently.

It turns out, much to the shock of an engineer like me, that out there in the real world sometimes hard numbers are not used as metrics! I write about Microsoft as an example because it is what I know, but I am sure that it is the case for a lot of big and small companies out there.

Our security group, for example, secures applications that come out of Microsoft. The analysts are top notch, and I can tell you that the process has been designed and re-designed to make it of value to our customers, both internal and external ones. Now, this question of value really interested me: how are we making sure that we add it to the applications that go through our program?

Surely, I thought, there must be sensors along the way that statistically tell us how much more or less successful are attacks against the applications we secure than to the applications we do not. Well, I went around asking the team about these metrics, and to my surprise, I found out that we do not have the numbers, for a variety of reasons.

You see, the practice of making software secure, or ‘trustworthy’ as Microsoft would say, has everything to do with how we measure risk and how we desire to cope with it. The combination of impact, probability of attack, and efficacy of response is what determines the inherent risk of an application, according to our team. These three values are inherently difficult to quantify –how would you measure the probability of an attack?–, so experts got together and determined a score for different attributes of an application. That is all warm and fuzzy for trying to decide what to do when we receive a new application, but it does not tell us what the value of our actions is.

How, then, are our customers coming back and are all of our engineers at ease? The answer, it turns out, is that we humans are really bad at calculating risk. We fear much from small risks and avoid any thought of big ones; all the cognitive heuristics and biases that we use, coupled with our risk averse personalities, make us crave for reassurance that our actions are as risk free as possible. That is where trustworthy computing groups come in; that is where we satisfy that craving. It does not matter that we do not know for sure if our actions are adding value or not; our customers do not care, at least not that much. Management certainly does care, it is only logical that we do make things better by checking software than by not checking it, but our customers value more the feeling we provide, the familiarity of the experience, the consistency of the service, the distribution of responsibility, and the visibility of our process.

Anyway, I digress. I will probably write more about securing software some other time, but I did want to arrive to that part about the metrics that the industry values. Of them, visibility is very important, as I found out on my own and as it has been discussed recently because of the stack ranking used at Microsoft. In the tech industry, visibility is king. In the end, visibility is what Jeff Atwood suggested, as many others have, to become awesome: create things and do it in public!

In recent days I contacted Tess Rinearson because a friend of mine told me she had met her over the weekend. I had read some of her posts thanks to Hacker News, and had not realized that she was also interning at Microsoft. I went to her blog, read some posts, and took a look at her resume. I was impressed to see everything she has accomplished for her (slightly) young(er) age.

I suggested that we should meet for lunch and talk about personal branding, something that I think she is good at, even if she does not realize it. I liked her answer. The conversation was something like:

Me: I basically wanted to talk about career dev, personal branding and tech in general 🙂 I like your blog posts.

Tess: Thanks. I honestly haven’t done a ton of that, at least not intentionally. I’m a freshman >.> so mostly I just have been writing and thinking.

She has just been writing and thinking. Well, that is a helluva an answer. I had been thinking of starting a blog for a while, carefully selecting my topics, deciding on what I would be writing in advance. I had it all wrong. Your persona is not something you design and showcase. Sure, you can try to engineer it, but you will only be cheating other people and possibly making a fool of yourself in the future. No, your persona is something that shows every day and that is inherent to all the things that interest you. You do not have to choose what you write about; you do not even have to think too much about what you work on. If your brand is interesting and worthwhile, it will show and other people will enjoy it and find value in it.

So here. This is my first post and this is how I have chosen to showcase it. I had been doing a lot of thinking, but not a lot of writing. I’ll follow Tess’s simple response and hope that the conversation I have with all of you is worthwhile and that it makes for a coherent picture of who I am.

With that said, I leave for lunch. Blue cheese burger anyone?

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