About
My name is Grady Ward and I am an engineer living and working in Boulder Colorado. Originally from Vermont, I went to school in Boston, worked in the Bay Area for a few years, and have lived in Colorado since 2018. When I was at Google, I worked on a broad range of issues that surround the responsible custodianship of data, including counter-abuse, privacy, and regulatory compliance. I'm a proud member of the IAPP, and the Integrity Institute. In my full time work today, I'm one half of a two-person 501(c)(3) focused on helping nonprofits scale their impact: Silicon Ally.
Outside of work, I take advantage of the best of Colorado. I ski as often as I can, and hike and run the rest of the year. Building things brings me joy - currently I'm focusing on algorithmically generated board game cards, but in the past I've done civic engagement work, woodworking, algorithmic art, essay collections, and modular origami. Building things is the only thing I am confident I will be doing in 30 years.
I do my best to limit the set of things I care about and believe in to only those that I feel very strongly about. A small selection of that set:
- Our primary responsibility is living a life in line with our personal principles.
- Technology that attempts to modify human behavior tends to be corrosive to our wellbeing.
- The human story is one of compounded iterative improvement - engineering connects us to past generations and builds a foundation for future ones. Abstraction and decomposition are at the heart of progress.
- Optimization is a tool and a methodology, not an end.
- Silence and stillness are salves for a world with too much motion.
- Finding and expanding your physical capacity is a great joy.
- Dogs are the best among us.
