Hello, humans.

There was no Systems for Humans last month.

I spent much of the month studying cloud computing: networking, databases, compute, security and the architecture that allows software to scale from one machine to millions of users. The goal was the Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer certification, which I’m happy to say I completed.

What surprised me wasn’t the technology itself, but the question it left me with.

What deserves to scale?

Cloud platforms have become incredibly good at helping us build larger systems. But before asking how we scale something, perhaps we should spend more time asking what and why we’re scaling in the first place.

Systems for Humans is growing

Systems for Humans recently received a grant from the Design Justice Network to support the growth of this project. I was also selected as a mentor with Uncommon, where I’ll be working with aspiring software engineers from different backgrounds.

Those experiences have changed how I think about this newsletter.

It will still cover software, AI and cloud computing, but I also want to explore the people and philosophies behind the systems we build. Software isn’t the only system worth studying. Businesses, cities, schools, governments, markets and even art all reveal something about what we value.

Which brings me to Howard.

Disproportional Realism

For this issue, I sat down with Howard, a local artist developing a philosophy he calls Disproportional Realism. Alongside his artwork, he’s converting part of his gym into what will become a privately owned art gallery.

His work is built to critique simple how in life things don’t always become important because of what they are. They become important because of the attention we collectively give them.

Sport, money, status, politics, religion, social media—our lives are full of things that occupy far more space than their physical size would suggest. Howard’s work asks whether those proportions are justified and what we lose by overlooking everything else.

That struck me because software does the same thing

Every system reflects priorities. What gets measured becomes visible. What gets funded improves. What gets automated scales. Over time, those decisions stop looking like decisions and start looking like reality.

Perhaps systems are simply philosophy made visible.

What we choose to scale

The more I study cloud computing, the more I realize that engineering answers only part of the problem.

Engineers ask whether we can build something. Architects ask whether it can scale. Businesses ask whether it can make money. AI increasingly asks whether it can be automated.

The remaining question belongs to all of us.

Should this be the thing we make larger?

Technology doesn’t decide that. We do.

What I’m learning now

This month:

• Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer — completed but only just begun. It fundamentally changed how I think about software, from writing code to operating systems at scale.

• Terraform — my current focus. I’m learning Infrastructure as Code and beginning to appreciate that infrastructure itself can be designed, reviewed and version-controlled just like software.

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Systems for Humans explores technology, design and the systems we build around human life.