Why the centrepiece of this site is a hand-drawn map and not a list of jobs in reverse chronological order.
The first big thing I built on this site is the constellation. It is a hand-positioned map of the work I have done: education, roles, products, research, joined by lines that mean this led to that. There are four lenses on it, one for each kind of work I do, and you can switch between them.
This is a short note about why it took the shape it did.
A CV is a list. The format insists that the work is sortable by time. Most jobs become a single line; the lines have the same weight whether the role mattered to you or not; the connections between things, which are usually the most interesting part of a career, are invisible.
A career is not a list. It is a graph. Some things led to other things and some did not. Some skills compound; some are dead ends you learned from anyway. Some employers were stops; some were places you became a different engineer. A list cannot show any of that.
So I made a graph, not a list. The constellation tries to put the story of a career on the page, instead of the index.
Force-directed layouts, spring physics, flow charts: most career-graph attempts I have seen reach for these. They produce the same kind of result. A mass of nodes in the middle of the canvas, edges crossing each other, no spatial logic the eye can use. Pretty enough as a screenshot. Useless as a map.
A career has a spatial logic. Mine, for example, runs diagonally. Education in the lower left (Bogotá), the London turn through the centre, the current work in the upper right. The eras have positions. The decisions have positions. A force-directed layout cannot know that. So I placed every node by hand.
The empty space between the nodes is also chosen. That is the difference between a map and a graph: a map is composed; a graph is computed. The constellation is a map.
The constellation has four ways of looking at the same data: engineering, machine-learning systems, products shipped, research. Each lens redraws the same set of nodes with a different subset highlighted and a different set of edges in focus. The same career, four ways.
The lenses exist because no single line through a career is the true line. The engineer's view of the work is different from the researcher's view, which is different from the maker's view. All three are right, in the way that any decent observation is right when you are honest about which lens you used.
The constellation is a CV the way I wanted one to look. If you have an opening you think I could be useful for, the constellation tells you in thirty seconds whether it is the right kind of work. If you ended up here through a thing I made, it tells you what else is on the shelf.
The list of jobs is still on the homepage if you want it. The constellation is the version that took longer to make and rewards reading it longer.