I believe that humanity's high calling and deep purpose is the neverending struggle against the varied forces of entropy. Tempered by the wisdom of allowing natural forms of order to co-exist and simultaneously be captured in time, we live to create in our environment a reflection of our own inner sense of order. Every meal prepared, every elegant algorithm, and every imperfect echo frozen by sheer force of will is one more piece of the pattern coalesced from the ethereal storm and notched on the spear of humanity's collective soul.
Take a handful, grab hold of the writhing chaos, keep your grip in the face of adversity, and shape it into something that can't help but be beautiful until it hurts.
We will eventually be forgotten, and remembered only for what we added or took away.
I prefer to add.
I am still self-identify as a technical and strategist management consultant, though it's been a few years since I've done that sort of work. You can still contact me at jobs@aquick.org (or twitter, or metafilter, or flickr...) if you are interested in that sort of thing, but for the past few years, I've been working fulltime as the Chief Technologist and Lead Architect for Morningside Analytics. We make highly detailed maps of the internet, which describe emergent communities of interest and patterns of authority within those communities.
Of the work I've done, I most prefer end-to-end project guidance. That is - straddling the business and technical sides of a project. Sitting down with people who have a need, identifying that need and the ways in which it can be filled with a tool, and then leading a development team to build that tool. I usually think of this role as "Architect/PM". I am interested in doing some development myself, but I usually pick out some tricky / core parts and do those, while assisting with the rest of the development. I pride myself on being able to elucidate requirements and then lead a team to build systems that meet those requirements elegantly.
In addition to architecture, PM, and systems design and performance analysis, I am a good coder (I try to write clear, concise, and documented code), I can work in a number of languages, I'm comfortable picking up new environments, and I have strong skills in general CMS, workflow, process, data modeling, caching, general performance analysis and optmization, project management, security practices, and usability. I'm a solid Linux/FreeBSD sysadmin and network architect.
I do a great deal of work with Ruby on Rails, MongoDB, MySQL, AWS/EC2, and high performance web application scaling in general. Generally, I'm not interested in Microsoft development.
When I have the time and feel like there's something interesting unsaid, I write a blog about
For more details, see my
I love to cook. I am a big advocate of local food and I hit the farmer's markets a few times a week. I try to bake at least every two weeks. I always make extra so I can give it away. People are often very surprised by random homemade baked goods, and always pleasantly.
I have an infrequently updated blog on which I post photographs of my cooking projects and rants about processed food:
Other things of note: my older hedge.net stuff (weird and eclectic) or someoftheanswers.com (mostly rants), or my defunct livejournal blog, or my bloglines blog (which I don't use much), or my Sidekick blog (now defunct due to T-Mobile's heavy hand). I have sometimes used del.icio.us to catalog my bookmarks.
I like to participate in Ask Metafilter on a semi-regular basis.
Music: adamfieldsmusic.com
Film Production: IMDB entry (no personal site in evidence)
Stand-up Comedy in Amsterdam: adamfields.net