2 About

2 About
*******

My name is Frederico Muñoz, and here is where I collect my writings.

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A Portrait of the Artist as a...

I'm from Lisbon, Portugal, and I have an active interest and
participation in several different areas. I mostly write about
technology, and I've been personally and professionally involved in
programming and technology since I got my first Sinclair ZX Spectrum
48k. I have been especially involved in the free software movement, and
it was due to this involvement in the early 90s that I ended up making a
career out of it.

2.1 What I get paid to do
=========================

I'm currently Cloud & Architecture Lead for South West & East Europe at
SAS (1), where I work around the areas of cloud computing, analytics,
and data science, with a strong focus on solution design and
architectural best-practices and governance.

Previously I spent a bit more than a decade at IBM (2), where I had
multiple job roles, from leading solution design to Quantum computing
and AI.

You can have a look at *note my CV: CV, or visit my LinkedIn profile
(3).

I keep some of my presentations at Speaker Deck (4).

2.2 What I do anyway
====================

Most of my personal projects seem unrelated with my professional life,
and to a large extent they are, but they always give me something that
ends up being useful - to a large extent, my entire career is a
consequence of 'wasting time' in things that later became major sources
of recognition.

I've gathered most of my side projects in the *note Projects:: page,
but these warrant a special mention here:

“Political affinities and distances through the analysis of voting records (Proximidades e distâncias: análise da actividade parlamentar (5) [PT])”

What if we could position political parties _exclusively_ through
the way they vote, and not because of pre-determined analysis of
what they say about themselves? This is what led me to come out
with an approach to _calculate the political distance of parties
based on their voting record_, and present that information
graphically.

_Uses Jupyter, Pandas, scikit-learn, matplotlib, Seaborn_, read
more *note in the Project page: Voting Analysis.

“Visualising martial arts lineages through a community database (Budō Lineage Tree (6))”

This one is at the intersection of my interests as a judoka (and,
consequently, a budoka), and my programming background. I was
looking for an excuse to brush up on JavaScript, and this was the
perfect one: the history of martial arts is the history of those
that have taught them, and the information on how different arts
evolved, spread, and influenced each other is scattered and
partial.

_Built with JavaScript, Cytoscape.js, Bulma, Parcel.js_, read more
*note in the Project page: Budotree.

2.3 Things I learned
====================

I have a BA in *Archaeology*, and I'm finshing the Masters. This has
greatly influenced me throughout my life in IT in subtle, but important
ways, and while I never ended up working in the field, it's something I
keep myself up-to-date on and than keenly interests me. My focus areas
while at the University of Lisbon where mostly around the Bronze Age,
Pre-Roman Iberia, and the Calcolithic period. Some of my coursework was
at this intersection of humanities and technology where I live:

• *Analysing arrowheads sizes and distribution*, using R and LaTeX.
• *Using deep neural networks* for identifying arrowhead types, using
MXNet (7).
• *Applications of GIS software*, namely programmatic creation of
repeatable documentation using R, and usage of satellite imagery,
elevation maps, and archaeological data layers using QGIS (8)

On the other side of the equation, I also have a background in
*Physics*, even if far from being extensive enough for anything truly
complex. Still, forcing myself to catch-up with all the important
things that had been sidelined was as grueling as rewarding, and it
opened up doors which I didn't knew existed -- and which I continue to
explore at every opportunity. Taking up programming from a more formal
perspective was very interesting, but the 'hard math' disciplines were
the challenging ones. Still, some of the coursework was very useful for
my professional endeavours, namely the overview on _Quantum computing_
which really helped me in my (at the time) roles as Quantum Ambassador
for IBM.

2.4 This site
=============

During the years, I created several different blogs and websites, most
long gone. The rise of 'social networks' has an effect on the ways
information was expected to be shared, often to the detriment of
personal internet presences.

This site is my attempt to reclaim that personal space and make up
for my past laziness. With that in mind, I am constantly updating this
with _posts from the past_, aggregating here what I shared in different
places.

The choice of technology is also purposeful. I have built a solution
around (9) to build the (static) site, which I feel is particularly
useful in terms of focusing on content. The HTML produced by Texinfo
sources has always had a very practical (and distinctive) look about
them, and that focus on content was something I wanted to have, with
(minimal) styling. The end result ends up following a _Brutalist
approach to web design_, but that was initially unintended.

You can read more about all of it *note here: Texiblog.

2.5 What's going on with the website title and the citation used?
=================================================================

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Cover of 'Andromeda: a Space-Age Tale'

Efremov (10) was a Soviet paleontologist that founded _taphonomy_, a
concept that is also used in Archaeology. He was also a science-fiction
writer, and 'Andromeda: a Space-Age Tale' marked an important change in
the literary treatment of science-fiction (especially in the change from
the 'near future' time scale to the 'thousands of years into the future'
one)., being very influential both within and outside the USSR - same
say that «Star Wars» is partially inspired by it. I read it at a
reasonably young age and it had a lasting impact, and I was very far
away of knowing that I would read Efremov because of taphonomy. You can
read it at the Internet Archive (11), if you're curious.

I picked up the name _interlayered_ from Archaeology (through
Geology) as it reminded how Internet communication used to happen (and
still does, although with significant changes): each page being a layer
that is connected to others, something that was even more direct in the
BBS/UUCP/FidoNet days. A _transmission_ is a way for this inanimate
repository of texts to reach others, focusing on the unidirectional
nature of it, an antidote for the excessive concern for 'amplification'
and 'engagement' that has become the norm in social networks.

Both these concepts reminded of Efremov and Andromeda, and I took the
opportunity to reference a piece of my upbringing.

2.6 Copyright
=============

Prose content is CC BY-SA 4.0 (12).

Code mentioned usually links to a file with the licence information.

Copyright © 2013-2023 Frederico Muñoz

---------- Footnotes ----------

(1) SAS (https://www.sas.com/)

(2) IBM (http://www.ibm.com)

(3) LinkedIn profile (https://www.linkedin.com/in/fsmunoz/)

(4) Speaker Deck (https://speakerdeck.com/fsmunoz)

(5) Proximidades e distâncias: análise da actividade parlamentar
(https://fsmunoz.github.io/parlamento/html/intro.html)

(6) Budō Lineage Tree (http://budotree.judoc.org)

(7) MXNet (https://mxnet.apache.org)

(8) QGIS (https://qgis.org/)

(9) <GNU Texinfo>

(10) Efremov (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Yefremov)

(11) at the Internet Archive
(https://archive.org/details/efremovandromeda)

(12) CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)