About "Life of Mogwai"

My name is Justin Irabor. I am many things, and will be many more things. Today, I am an AI product engineer and co-founder building a version of the future I am capable of building.

Over the course of my career, I have written communiques, memos, and blog posts sharing my thoughts about life and work. Those pieces are scattered around the web, in internal company systems and on public servers. I am now putting my writings together under a single website and newsletter.

This is it.

About the Stardate System

Every post here is dated twice — once in calendar form, once as a Star Trek–style stardate. If you've watched The Next Generation you'll recognize them: the long decimal numbers Captain Picard recites at the top of every log entry:

Personally I use this TNG-styled dating system because I am trying to write things that are relevant regardless of the time in which they were written. The dating system allows me be a nerd about Star Trek while obfuscating the fingerprint of time from the casual reader. Diabolical, I know.

The formula: it increments by a thousand per year, starting from 1948. The decimal at the end is the day of that year. It's simple, easy to infer, and a sheer delight.

What do you typically write about?

A surprisingly complex question!

Before I worked in tech, I owned a blog called "Ag(r)eek" (a geek studying agric—I must have felt very pleased with myself). I wrote fiction mostly. By the start of my tech career, I mostly wrote didactic working lessons in a blog called "The Office Guy". Afterwards, when I became interested in animation, I wrote a brief newsletter called "Do While Thinking", a sort of experiment to psych myself out of theorizing instead of shipping.

The latest—and I daresay more "mature"—iteration of my textual presence for the last three or so years has been a substack with about 2,500 subscribers called "Craft Overflow".

In a different life, I wrote and illustrated a webcomic called "Obaranda".

With Life Of Mogwai, I am combining all these experiments into one body of work representing my thoughts on life broadly: I will write technical essays (reminiscent of Craft Overflow), self-indulgent memoirs (like Ag(r)eek), draw comics and illustrations (like on Obaranda), and write about my perspective while building Humans in the Loop (reminiscent of Do While Thinking).

Thank you for reading, and I hope you hang around.