The Backyard Quarry: Turning Rocks Into Data

Another round of tech layoffs rolled through the industry recently, and I was one of the people caught in it. If you’ve worked in tech for any length of time, you know the routine that follows. Update the résumé. Reach out to contacts. Scroll job boards. Try to figure out which technologies the market is currently excited about and which ones have quietly drifted into irrelevance. After a few days of that cycle, I found myself spending more time outside than in front of a laptop. One afternoon, walking around the yard, I noticed something interesting. My backyard contains a surprisingly large dataset. Rocks. Sample of the rocks from the Backyard Quarry used for the dataset. Lots of rocks. Some are the size of peas. Others are roughly the size of a car engine. A few fall somewhere in the unsettling range between “wheelbarrow recommended” and “this probably requires heavy machinery.” Naturally, I had the same thought many people eventually have when staring at a large pile of rocks: I co