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About

Low-poly illustration of Dirk Primbs holding a lightbulb

Hi, I'm Dirk.

Father. Feminist. Sceptic. Technologist. Podcaster. Photographer. Writer. Speaker. Roughly in that order on a good day.

The day job

I lead global developer programs at Google, working out of Toronto since 2023 and, before that, Frankfurt. My teams build the programs that connect Google with developer communities - a few million developers across more than 130 countries - which mostly means I think about how large groups of people learn things, help each other, and decide what to trust.

I got here sideways. I trained as a retail salesperson, spent a couple of years running the store's UNIX inventory system, and never really left computing after that. Support engineer, then developer evangelist, then a decade at Microsoft, then Google since 2014. I've given talks at something north of 500 events, which is either a lot of airports or a reasonable career, depending on how you count.

I'm also still a student - I just completed a master's in artificial intelligence, after earlier ones in information systems and business, plus a detour through psychology that turned out to be more useful than any of them.

This blog is mine, not my employer's. Nothing here is a Google position, an announcement, or a hint about one. If it sounds like an opinion, that's because it is, and it's my own.

Outside of that

I've been podcasting since 2014 - somewhere past 1,500 episodes across eight shows, in German and English, about photography, ideas, and whatever two people can argue about productively for forty minutes. I take photographs, increasingly in infrared, which is a good way to be reminded that your eyes are a fairly narrow instrument.

What this blog is

Unprompted is where I think out loud about the intersection of technology, AI ethics, philosophy, and modern living. Some of it is about the tools we're building and what they're doing to us. Some of it is about attention, habits, and the small mechanics of a life. Some of it is about photography, because that's where I go when I want to look at something properly.

It's a personal blog in the old sense. There's no content strategy, no posting schedule, and no through-line beyond what I happen to be chewing on.

How it's made, and who wrote it

Every text here is ideated and drafted by me. The AI polishes - grammar, rhythm, the sentence I've rewritten four times and still hate. The thinking is mine; the last coat of paint often isn't. Each post carries a label saying exactly which parts were touched, because I think that's the minimum you owe a reader.

The site runs on a static blog engine I wrote myself. It's local-first: the drafting happens on my own machine, mostly against models running there too. There are no trackers, no analytics, no cookies, and no third-party scripts loading behind your back. Nothing on this page phones anyone.

Comments work through Mastodon. Every post is announced there, and replies to that post become the comment thread you see at the bottom of the article - so the conversation lives on a platform I don't own and you don't have to sign up for anything new. I moderate that thread lightly; not every reply is reproduced here, and none of them are edited.

If you want to know more about how any of that works, ask me - I like talking about it more than is strictly healthy.

Elsewhere

The best way to reach me is email: dp@primbs.de. I read everything, and I answer most of it eventually.