tangentialism is David Yee!
I help make software things happen and facilitate the life of engineering teams—currently building a Parenting team and product at the New York Times, and before that as the head of Chorus engineering at Vox Media. I made my bones at the startups Editorially (CTO and Co-founder) and 20×200 (Chief Architect), and was once known for drawing amateurish pictures really quickly.
You'll need to know
I am @tangentialism on Twitter. I have a public key on Keybase. Though a lot of my code is private, I do have a Github profile.
Things I've written
- on Lara Hogan's Resilient Management
- “What Lara does here is offer that there is nothing particularly unique to the challenge of engineering management: understanding people and how they react to the world around them.”
- Amazon's jobs would have been a giant nail in the coffin for the city's underprivileged populations, already on their last legs
- “We've seen this before.”
- Something I wrote about an early peer-to-peer music sharing site—still vastly better than today's services
- “Entire catalogs of small labels and under-appreciated musicians were enshrined on Audio Galaxy, distributed to a new generation of listeners whose encyclopedic knowledge of 1960's African Funk could challenge Fela Kuti himself.”
- On our tenth anniversary
- “Looking up to see eighty people totally happy for you is a really great and unusual feeling.”
- Twenty internet things I like, in penitence for complaining
- “Dark days come and go, but Friday should be sacrosanct.”
- The day we announced Editorially
- “I was raised to be an editor, but I always wanted to be a writer.”
- The day I left 20×200
- “The culture of startups is overflowing with mythical personae of pirates and ninjas, but I’m not a pirate—I’m an evangelist and a plumber.”
If we ever meet, you should ask me about
- Ethical engineering management
- Amateurism
- The primacy of behaviors over tools
- The street life of cities
- Patterns of space
- People-watching
- Irrational preservation
- Bach Keyboard Partitas
- Brooklyn, but mostly the old Brooklyn
- Tasty foods
- Collaboration
- All work is hospitality