Yesterday while I was cooking dinner, I happened to re-watch Bryan Cantrill’s talk on “Platform as a Reflection of Values“. (I watch a lot tech talks while cooking or baking — I often have trouble focusing on a video unless I’m doing something with my hands, but if I know a recipe well I can often make it on autopilot.)

If you haven’t watched this talk before, I encourage checking it out. Cantrill gave it in part to talk about why the node.js community and Joyent didn’t work well together, but I thought he had some good insights into how values get built into a technical artifact itself, as well as how the community around those artifacts will prioritize certain values.

While I was watching the talk (and chopping some vegetables), I started thinking about what values are most important in the “HPC cluster platform”.

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