Eamon Glen Hubbard

Our son and Signe's brother, Eamon Glen Hubbard, was born just over a week ago. All went well, Merry and Eamon are healthy, now we are all home again.

We had a harder time naming Eamon than we had with Signe, a fact we explained first with gender (we had several girl names we liked when Signe was born, but had trouble finding inspiration for boy names). We knew (or perhaps justified) that we needed to see him before we named him, as we had with Signe, and indeed, his scrunchy face and head of thick blond hair prompted us to eliminate most of our list.

Eamon was a name I first liked because it seemed vaguely western and cowboy-ish (though perhaps this was just a liminal influence of Longmire). Caring for him in our room, the name took on a certain appropriateness when Merry realized it was a near-anagram of "no name"! We settled tentatively on it and started looking for a complementary middle name.

We first considered some options which "flowed well" (e.g., Eamon Gray, Eamon James) but these held no meaning to us. On the last morning in the hospital, I suggested Glen, telling Merry that Glen Canyon was a place my grandmother had first told me about. It was her I had most wished to link Signe's name to, though no workable opportunity had presented itself then.

What does it mean to name a person for a place, albeit one eliciting association to another person? First, it's worth noting that "Glen" is actually two references - the specific Glen Canyon in Southern Utah and Northern Arizona, named by John Wesley Powell on the 1869 expedition of the Colorado River and submerged beneath Lake Powell in the 1960s, and glen, the term for a secluded valley. Extrapolating from the latter, Eamon Glen implies a fictional or undiscovered place, ("a glen named Eamon") and, to me, at least, is euphonically pleasing (i.e., Tolkien's "Cellar Door").

This also provides a foundation beneath the specific place of Glen Canyon, a place neither my grandmother nor myself ever visited (though I did jet ski on Lake Powell in 2002 and visit Hole in the Rock in 2008) and which Eamon and I remain unable to visit - at least, until such a fortunate future age when Glen Canyon dam may be removed.

At that time, the sandstone will be 'bleached' by the water and the old riverbed and stream beds covered in a thick layer of sediment, much of which may be toxic. Riparian zones could take decades to reappear, and the canyon's original biodiversity may never recover. Assuming Glen Canyon re-emerges, it will resemble a wasteland, of no use to either of its previous constituencies - those who enjoyed the canyon, and those who enjoy the lake. What meaning could someone possibly find in that third state?

It wouldn't stay inhospitable forever. And within that slow recovery it powerfully evokes the archetype of redemption, in which something lost is recovered, in a diminished form which nevertheless retains a core essence. Or stated from the perspective of the redeemer: the process by which meaning is derived from loss (such as the loss of a loved one), honoring its memory and finding new life within it.

My grandmother passed away fifteen years ago, yet she is often the one I think of even now when I am struggling with moral decisions - what would she think if I did [x]? Clearly there is still life in my memory of her, a small part of which I give to Eamon Glen. We are thrilled he is here with us.

R.I.P., Walter Scott, Jr.

Walter Scott Jr., a prominent Omaha philanthropist, recently passed away at 90. I had a link to him: for a couple years, I threw his money down the toilet.

I was a Walter Scott, Jr. Scholarship recipient in the college of Information Science & Technology (IS&T) at UNO. I found out a few weeks before I graduated high school, and having applied to too few other colleges, I had already decided to attend UNO anyway, to stay close to my high school girlfriend. At my parents' urging, I called to check in on my application - because I had never heard anything - and they called me back the next day to tell me I had been accepted!

Walter Scott had big plans for the IS&T program at UNO in 1999, but at the time it was just the Peter Kiewit Institute for Technology and a lot of empty land. I was most of the way through my first semester when I fell into a severe depression. I ended the semester with two A's, a D, and two F's. Two weeks into the spring semester, I stopped attending classes altogether.

That May, my parents helped me make an appeal to Scott's scholarship administrator to reinstate me that fall, given that I was undergoing treatment and, we believed, showing progress. They agreed. This time, I was an inaugural resident in the new Scott Dorms, intending to focus myself on school life.

I didn't. I moved in, but only lived there a week. I never attended a single class. Over Thanksgiving, my dad went and got my stuff out of my dorm - I was too ashamed and embarrassed, I couldn't face my dorm mates. I couldn't even admit to myself what I had done - I didn't have the strength to face the darkness of my own failings.

It took me almost a decade to fully recover from depression, during which time I developed myriad coping mechanisms. One of these was to "reverse engineer" equanimity for my life situation - whenever I made a mistake, I would say to myself: who was I to have known where that decision would lead me? I was an 18-year old whose naiveté and ignorance were not only plausible, but to be expected. The consequences of my actions, I concluded, were tragic, but they could hardly have been avoided.

It took me many more years to fully internalize my sense of personal accountability, and to think frankly about what I threw away - not just a philanthropist's money, but my own opportunities, and time. And yet, to try to dig the root cause out of the past - not my academic failure or depression, but the behavior that precipitated those - seems so intractable as to be pointless. Those propensities were a part of myself as far back in my memory as I can reach. It was inevitable that I would have to face them. Could I have maneuvered around them so as to limit the damage? The question seems detached, by my estimation, from reality.

A different question: was I predestined to this particular outcome, or should I have been more accountable?

Well, both, along a continuum, I guess. The reconciliation of the two requires a belief that every day is an opportunity to become a better version of ourselves. If I lacked resilience from a young age, then the right time to start building resilience was whenever I became aware I needed more. Same with temperament, same with discipline, same with patience, same with focus, same with anything. And it's still true.

We can all fall victim to the vicissitudes of life. But resilience is our defense, and even without knowing where I would've ended up, I do wish I would have known the value of possessing resilience earlier.

Goodbye, Avantas

Today is my last day at Avantas. I started working there just under 17 years ago, in August of 2004, while I was in college. My first job was as the receptionist. I had applied for an early-morning job running reports and doing other "office work" for a department called Agency Management. The shifts were 4am to noon on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays. The idea of waking up early terrified me, but it was by far the best paying job I could find that fit with my class schedule, so I applied, then followed up the next week, and was more than a little surprised to get an interview.

I wandered in uncertainly and was soon taken into the main conference room to meet the HR leader and the Director of Operations. I was in a good mood - which must have been apparent - and they were in good moods, we all laughed, I gave honest answers even when they were unflattering and I remembered their names when we parted. I got a call the next day - they thought I'd be a good fit for an IT internship instead, which was fine by me, but I'd work at the front desk the first two weeks while the IT leader vetted me. Avantas managed hospital staffing, and the receptionist position was normally filled by one of the secretarial pool staff that were not on assignment. But, business was booming and everyone was on assignment. Having built websites in high school, I immediately started helping the Marketing director rebuild the company's. Meanwhile, the IT director gave me data entry tasks and some rudimentary data analysis.

Two weeks later I got a cubicle next to his, and along with the other intern (a guy named Jerome who I incidentally knew beforehand) the IT group grew from two to four. Jerome was doing statistical research to predict patient volumes and I was running & modifying Crystal Reports, then learning to build them, later I started using ASP.NET to build an online portal & dashboard, learning as I went. The latter took me a few months, I coded all the graph rendering from scratch using the drawing libraries (I was too naive to know there were 3rd party packages to do this). A lot happened in the first year - Jerome and the other IT guy left, then my boss was let go. I had already been promoted from Intern to Analyst - within a year I was promoted to Analyst 2, then Analyst 3. The two guys I worked closest with then were both cynical and endearing, I had a fraction of their experience, but they were patient, they accepted me, and they taught me a ton. I didn't appreciate it enough then, but looking back, I'm tremendously grateful we crossed paths.

We modified a mostly-finished version of a web-based shift signup application that a contractor had previously built - fixing some glaring omissions and hard-coded parameters, while I softened the shrill UI. We had enough time for functional testing, but not load testing, and the night it went live (at midnight, for reasons lost to time) it timed out on the users due to the database load. No customer support plan existed, and when users called into our 24/7 staffing office, they transferred them to us. We hacked together a series of fixes that night and the following days.

Soon after, we started building version two of the app. We convinced our new director that it would have to be rebuilt from scratch - too many of the foundational assumptions in the code were wrong and couldn't easily be refactored, plus the database was horribly un-optimized. The process of defining the requirements and technical design of the new version was one of the joys of my professional career. My coworker friends taught me how to think about requirements, business object definition, database design, coding standards and more. I look back in awe at what I learned that year. Mid-way through the project, one of them left - then the other six months later. We hired a new UI Developer and I was promoted to Lead Developer. As I was finishing up the last pieces of version 2 - testing the [properly modular] interface I had designed to our 3rd party staffing software - work halted. My boss had signed a contract for another company to build us our own staffing software from the ground up! Being reliant on a 3rd party solution had long held our consulting and business intelligence businesses back, so this was a huge strategic opportunity for Avantas, and one the company subsequently capitalized on. But it meant that version 2 - the only software app I ever designed and built from the ground up - would never see the light of day.

I moved into a Product Manager role and began collaborating daily with the owner of the other company. He and I collaborated to craft and execute an initial product vision and iterative roadmaps - I was a liaison to the users and a subject matter expert, he had experience bringing new software solutions to market, which we did with Smart Square in less than four months, in the spring of 2007.

The following year and a half was a whirlwind, spent building out the rest of the toolkit that we had long envisioned providing our customers. Meanwhile, the idea of going back to school nagged at me - I had never finished my degree, having accepted a full-time position with my second promotion after my internship. I went part-time in 2008, then left completely at the end of the year to do a semester abroad in Finland (I started this blog just prior).

I came home in mid-2009, when the the financial crisis was weighing most severely on the job market. Avantas had done a round of layoffs during my absence and any hires were out of the question. But at the end of that year, a woman who had started our Data Analytics department in 2008 hired me back to work on our patient forecasting - she actually contracted me back for a set number of hours (80, if I recall correctly, mostly to build and validate some data cleansing improvements in SAS), afterwards I proverbially 'kept showing up'. Soon thereafter, she left, and I found myself the sole member of our Analytics team!

When I graduated in the spring of 2010, I was hired back full time into a senior version of my old role. If there is one time in my history at Avantas that I wish I could go back to, it is then, so I could tell myself: "make sure you stay on a track you want to be on." Instead, I stayed - almost mindlessly - in the same role for eleven years. Why?

Because it was good enough in the right ways, I think. It paid enough, I knew enough, it was occasionally satisfying and I was always ready to believe greater things were just around the next corner. But too often in eleven years, they haven't been. The size of our team has increased by an order of magnitude, but it feels like the ability to innovate died years ago, and ultimately the promise of innovation is what has motivated me to work there since the earliest days. I am endlessly proud of the string of achievements from my first five or six years at Avantas. But the solidifying organization strangled our degrees of freedom, leading to a step-change down in our ability to deliver incremental value to our users. Successes now are small and isolated things, and many days it feels like the company - or at least the product - is in some sort of slow "run-off" mode, even though we're still signing contracts and growing revenue.

But I don't want to dwell on this, and even now it's not what I think about when I take a step back to assess the whole arc of my journey at Avantas. Even from the last decade, I'll remember working in good faith with coworkers and customers I liked and respected. And I hope - if I choose to work in technology again - that I can recapture the feeling of those early years, when I walked into an opportunity I couldn't then comprehend, stumbled around, somehow falling mostly forward and upwards, and came out the other end with the skills and experience that would define my career.