Who are you, and how should we talk to and about you?
My name is Adam Vinueza. For Spanish speakers, my last name is pronounced bean-WAY-sah; most people just say vin-WAY-sah, and that’s fine. My pronouns are from the “he” family, though as a rule I don’t get wound up about how people refer to me.
Your basic deets: where you live, what you do, your background.
I live in Louisville, Colorado (pronounced “Lewis-ville”), a medium-sized town just outside Boulder, with my wife and our dog. Virtually, you can find me on Bluesky.
For my daily bread, I currently manage software engineers for Strive Health, a health-care company specializing in patients with kidney disorders.
When I’m not doing engineering-manager things, I do a lot of reading, thinking, and cooking. You may also find me on running trails in and around Boulder.
My first career was as a philosophy professor; a position at the University of Colorado, Boulder is what brought me from New York City to Colorado. After not getting tenure, I studied some computer science and started working as a software engineer. For about ten years I worked on geocoders, which was super fun; these days I work on making sure Strive’s engineering teams are happily building useful things as well as they can.
What do you write about here?
Literature is a continual preoccupation, as are some of the more salient cultural and political issues of the day. Because managing people is my job, I also think a lot about managing well.
My interest in management and work led me down a circuitous path towards the work of psychoanalysts from The Tavistock Institute in London, specifically D.W. Winnicott and W.R. Bion. Bion is especially interesting to me.