About

A Mind For Life, LLC is an independent publisher registered in Kansas in 2010. It was founded by Mark Abraham to publish one book, and has since become the home for the software and writing that followed.

It starts with a cable, in 1983

He was eighteen, in the United States Army Signal Corps, and two pieces of radio equipment needed to talk to each other. No cable existed that would connect them. So he worked out what one would have to be, and built it.

The Army gave him the Army Achievement Medal for it.

That is the whole method, arrived at before he was twenty: when the thing that would solve the problem does not exist, the absence is not the end of the conversation. It is the job.

The founder

Mark Abraham is a writer, software developer and technical reviewer, and he has been doing versions of that cable ever since. The through-line of his working life is being early to things — and then having to run them at scale while the rest of the organisation caught up.

Being first, then being responsible for it

At CenturyLink he led “Journey to the Cloud”, an enterprise migration begun before that was a settled idea: twenty-two applications in twelve months, and seventy-nine moved in total once other teams followed. He co-pioneered DevOps and agile delivery in an organisation that had neither, and pushed into what was then being called NoOps.

None of that happened on a clean sheet. It was done while directing development and support for 154 backend applications — human capital, ERP, compensation, procurement and engineering systems — and while serving as Business Information Security Officer, responsible for security remediation across more than 14,000 servers and 1,400 applications against PCI, SOX and HIPAA. Identity and access management ran alongside it.

The hundred thousand that were really two hundred and fifty

The clearest example of how he works came out of that security remit. A vulnerability scan across an estate of 14,000 servers returned more than 100,000 findings. The estimate to work through them case by case came back at roughly $5 million over three months.

He did not accept the shape of the problem. Instead of treating 100,000 findings as 100,000 pieces of work, he built a model that sorted them by vulnerability type and criticality rather than by instance — on the observation that the same handful of root conditions were being counted again and again across the estate.

What came out the other side was around 250 distinct issues to fix. The remediation vector became type and criticality, not volume. The work was completed for roughly $40,000.

A hundred thousand findings were never a hundred thousand problems. They were two hundred and fifty problems, counted a hundred thousand times. The saving was not in working faster; it was in refusing the first description of the job.

Being first is the easy half. The difficult half is being first while still carrying everything that already existed, and being answerable for both.

Earlier, at Embarq, he launched embarq.com as the company separated from Sprint — an award-winning Java and web services platform — and put a hundred changes through it in its first ninety days. He handled application and systems integration through three large telecommunications mergers: Sprint/Embarq, CenturyTel/Embarq and CenturyLink/Qwest. He holds the CISSP.

Earlier still, at Sprint, he built a model for system availability that borrowed from somewhere nobody was looking: the electronics component lifecycle. Systems, it turns out, fail the way components do — heavily at the beginning, rarely in the middle, and increasingly towards the end — and once availability is described that way, the cost of uptime stops looking like a flat number and starts looking like a curve you can plan against.

That is the most characteristic thing on this page. He trained as an electronics technician before he wrote a line of enterprise software, and thirty years later the training was still the useful part. Taking a model from the discipline you came up in and pointing it at a problem the current discipline has not solved is the move he has made ever since.

He served five years in the Signal Corps as a secure communications systems repair technician, holding a Secret clearance, and deployed to Grenada in a combat zone.

Keeping secure communications working under conditions that do not care whether you are ready is a particular kind of training. The line from there to software-defined radio, to an observatory, to writing that insists on saying what was verified and what was not, is not a coincidence. It is one long interest in signals and in the instruments that measure them — and it began with a cable that had to be invented before anything could be heard at all.

He completed the National Preparedness Leadership Initiative at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, a crisis leadership programme run jointly with the Harvard Kennedy School's Center for Public Leadership.

The observatory

In 1999 he co-founded EverStaR Observatory, which holds Minor Planet Center observatory code 849. Working with Gina Fedon, he made six asteroid discoveries. Three have been numbered and permanently named in the International Astronomical Union's catalogue:

• 18873 Larryrobinson 1999 VJ22 · 13 Nov 1999
• 20623 Davidyoung 1999 TS11 · 10 Oct 1999
• 18883 Domegge 1999 YT8 · 31 Dec 1999

Both named discoveries honour other people: Larry Robinson, for his leadership in the amateur minor-planet community, and David Young, for his contributions to astronomy and education. The observations are published in the Minor Planet Circulars and indexed by Harvard's Astrophysics Data System.

A named minor planet keeps its name. Whatever else is written here, those three entries in the catalogue will outlast all of it — which is a useful standard to hold the rest of the work to.

Writing and radio

He has published SDRZone since 2011 — twenty-four long-form reviews and articles on software-defined radio, free to read, each dated and explicit about what was verified and what was not. He is a member of the American Radio Relay League and holds the amateur callsign NI0Z.

What the company publishes now

The Awareness Journey, reviewed by Kirkus Reviews. Arcade Commander, software for arcade cabinets. SDRZone and The Retro Experience, both published continuously and both free.

Contact

Write to mark@am4l.com. Plain text is welcome; there is no form on this site and nothing tracking you across it.