Friday, January 30, 2015

Time to say goodbye to APX Labs

I write this blog post with a bit of a heavy heart, as this is going to be a significant change for me. Friday, February 6th, 2015 is going to be my last day working full-time at APX Labs as an Associate Systems Engineer. After thinking about where I am, what I want to do, and how I might want to get there, I have decided that it is time to move on to a new position. After leaving APX, I will be starting work as a System Engineer at Berico Technologies here in Reston, VA.

I started working at APX in December of 2012. I had just graduated from RIT two quarters early, and was excited about coming back into the NOVA area in order to be a) working full-time at a "real" job - not just an internship - and b) back around family and friends. Originally working on an engineering contract that we had for the DoD, I eventually transitioned over to handle all internal IT services for the company and juggled half a dozen other items that really didn't fit with any one role.

Over the two-plus years that I have been at APX I have met and worked with a number of incredibly-talented engineers who have immense amounts of knowledge relating to what they do and are motivated to explore technology to further our collective knowledge. We have worked stressful, long hours, and played just as hard. Many friendships have been created and hopefully will be sustained long into the future. It has been a privilege working around such individuals and I hope that some of their enthusiasm and drive has rubbed off on me and will help me in the future as I progress through life. I hope to keep in touch with everyone as I am neither moving out of the area nor straying from technology as my day job.

The transition from one position to the next will be a significant change for me, but hopefully career-wise it will be for the best. I will be moving from general IT support for APX to doing Linux systems engineering for Berico. This work, focused around both company infrastructure and some contracts, should allow me to be able to experiment and develop my automation and virtualization skills by working with new techologies on the market and applying those to real situations. Whether I am able to utilize anything from oVirt to OpenStack or Ansible to Chef, I hope I will be able to learn and develop higher-level administration/engineering ideas that I will be able to leverage later on and throughout my career.

While transitioning from one thing to another is always hard, the future looks bright. A new opportunity awaits me to do work for others and to better myself holistically. I have nothing but the utmost respect for everyone at APX, and I wish them and the company all the best wishes for future endeavors. Much work has been done, but there is even more still left to do!

Onward and upwards,
Stephen

Tuesday, January 27, 2015

January Blizzard of 2015

(Disclosure: I am in no way, shape, or form a meteorologist or forecaster)

Snowfalls from January 26th/7th as of 5:08pm (via @NWS)
Large storms that impact high-population areas of the world (especially the US) always draw some sort of response from the general public. Whether that response is to note that the forecast was right-on or not, it is always heard. Yesterday's storm that impacted the northeast US coast was no different - it was expected to bring over a foot of snow to areas of the country north and east of Philadelphia, all of New Jersey, New York City, and all the way up to Boston and Maine.

Forecast snowfall by the NWS New York on January 26th - ~20 hours out
Just a day out ahead of the storm, there were multiple forecasts of 18-24" for the National Weather Service (NWS)'s New York office region, which did not seem incredibly outlandish. The two main global models - the GFS and the Euro - were consistently saying that there would be significant amounts of snow for the entire region, although the two models differed by more than a few inches for the greater New York City area. These same models also showed 2-3 feet of snow for the Boston metropolitan area and elsewhere north, which they have indeed received.

During and after the storm, the system tracked a small amount east, and New York was left with a maximum of about 11-12 inches of snow, significantly under the "official" amounts of snow forecast. While still a very sizable amount of snow, for which the city appeared to sufficiently prepare, it left hundreds or thousands disappointed as the "potentially historic" storm did not happen. This was for a multitude of reasons, both technical and human, but the outcome of this is purely one of human communication: how to accurately portray forecasts and the inevitable uncertainty that arises in trying to predict the future. The forecast presented by anybody - NWS or other - does not accurately portray the entire bell-curve of potential options that there are.

No forecast is going to be 100% correct, but it may be 100% wrong, depending on how events turn out. The NWS was one of the institutions forecasting this storm that went with snow estimates leaning on the high side; it appears that one of the models was favored more than others, due to its past reliability. This gets us to the underlying issue: forecasts are purely scientific and educated guesses. These forecasts are very scientific and analyzed thoroughly, but there's no getting around the fact that we cannot completely predict future weather. We try as we might, but there is an inevitable amount of uncertainty and unknown potential. One of the key takeaways of this storm is the fact that this known unknown needs to be presented along with the forecast, in order to allow people to have full knowledge of the situation.

Several different stations had their own takes on what the chances of snow in the NYC area would be. (@brianstelter)

All in all, the forecast as a whole was pretty decent. The total numbers were spot-on from around Long Island (30 inches!) to Connecticut and Boston, but lacking on the west side. As the image above shows, everybody has their own take on the information available to them. If there is even uncertainty expressed to forecasters, then this information needs to be translated to the public as well. Why do we make the assumption - or at least make it seem - that a forecast will fall into a single category or gradient, when we know those are only the most statistically-likely options?

Capital Weather Gang forecasts, including "boom" and "bust" percentages
One of the groups doing weather forecasting in the DC region is the Capital Weather Gang, who have been mastering the displaying of a forecast along with the potential for going above or below what is predicted. Especially when presented in a highly-readable format, this helps to present the general reader with a range of snow/precipitation that might be expected, as well as the explicit knowledge that the final result may exceed or fall below what is written. Some type of system appears to be needed on a larger scale and adopted by others in order to help convey the challenges of forecasting. While we wish that forecasts could be completely accurate all the time, that is simply just not the case.

Forecasting, like any science, is challenging, There will be good days, and there will be bad days. But at the end of each of these days, we need to evaluate what went right and/or wrong, and use those as lessons to feed future runs of different forecasts. Most forecasters do not do what they do for the money - they are in the job, just like any other, because it is what they like: the work, the challenge the reward, whatever it may be. A forecast that bust because an area only received a foot of snow instead of two or three feet? There's some sort of humor in that. They forecast that it would snow a significant amount, and it did! Were there wording mistakes by people all around when calling for the "potential historic" storm to topple the charts of largest storms? Yes, that's for certain. The potential risk in a forecast is part of what needs to be accomplished in order to provide people with information on how to go about their day - just like we say that there might be a 75% of rain on a given day - and that can then become part of their decision process in order to how to proceed.

All in all, the overall forecasts for this system were not bad. Areas that were forecast to receive snow received snow, and those that didn't generally did not. The global and mesoscale models did what they were supposed to and provided information to guide forecasts, and forecasters did what they thought was best. Mother Nature did what she does best and threw a couple of curveballs. No entity is infallible, but every entity has the opportunity to see where improvements may be made and execute on those. Presenting forecasts to the public is no different.

Additional reading material

Saturday, January 24, 2015

Well well...

Last post: November, 2012. Today: January, 2015. It's been an interesting 2-some years.

As much as I thought I might never bother to see this site again, another part of me apparently wants to attempt to start blogging again for unknown reasons. Much has changed in the 2-ish years since I last put up anything, and hopefully one change for the better is my writing abilities or my abilities to convey information.

For various reasons I probably will end up moving this to another provider - Medium, Blogger, etc. - there really isn't much of a point in hosting this myself. However in the meantime while I do that, I might end up putting up a couple of posts. Potential topics include a little bit of fascination about DC/NOVA history, weather, aviation, or various other items that end up being interesting to me.

EDIT: And yes, I'm laughing and shaking my head about these previous posts more than any of you are. Some (scratch that - a lot) of them are pretty terrible, both content-wise and layout/flashiness.