Day 100 of #100daysofnetworks
Challenge Defeated. Just Getting Started.
Hi everyone. Today is the day. Today is day 100 of the second iteration of #100daysofnetworks. I did the first one on LinkedIn in 2020 or so. As I have been inching towards Day 100, I’ve been having bittersweet feelings, but ChatGPT reminded me of something yesterday: I completed the challenge (twice), I didn’t complete my writing or my work.
So, today, I’m declaring that this challenge has been met and defeated. I set out to do this again in 2023, and it took three years to get to Day 100.
There’s the first article! I wrote the first one on Substack on September 21, 2023, almost three years ago!
My name is David Knickerbocker. I am a software engineer. Since childhood, I have been obsessed with getting computers to do interesting things. As a child, I was excited when I could programmatically get them to make beep boop noises, and then became interested in creating ASCII art after that. As a teenager, I spent a lot of time building (and breaking) computers. As an adult, my earliest obsession was web development, but that has shifted to data engineering and then to data science. My entire life has revolved around working with computers and getting them to do what I want them to do.
My career has entirely been in Information Technology (IT), but this has led me to working as a web developer, SQL developer, database administrator, data operations (dataops) engineer, data engineer, platform engineer, and now I am chief engineer in a company I am helping build.
My entire career’s emphasis has been to help people. This has led me to working in cybersecurity, in a hospital, in companies that help the U.S. Military community, and eventually to building a company to solve certain specific problems. For me, everything I do and build is about using technology to help humans. I don’t care about cybersecurity for the sake of cybersecurity or because it pays well. Helping people is my central mission.
Wow, I haven’t changed a bit. My focus is still on helping people, and that is why I wrote a book and created my companies.
And that is why I offer OSINT and GraphRAG training. Enroll today!
I want to help you. That is my mission. If you know of anyone who would benefit from my writing or training, please share it with them. Please tell others about me.
What have I learned and accomplished?
I also do this series because I want to get better at OSINT, AI Engineering, and software engineering. I am not an alien. I come from IT. I do Cybersecurity work. I worked in Data Operations. I was a Data Engineer and a Platform Engineer. If you are any of those things, you should be reading my content. I am like you, and I have my own set of extra tricks (OSINT, GraphRAG, NLP, Network Science).
So what have I learned?
I remember what led me to creating this series in 2020. I had rendered a large network of a few thousand nodes and I couldn’t see anything.
This is one of the first graphs I ever visualized (2018)—the social network from the book of Genesis from the Bible. I can’t find what I was looking at in 2020, but imagine it being about 100x more crowded than the above image.
In 2020, I had this really messy whole network visualization, and I didn’t know how to do much with it. I had previously spent about three years mapping out production dataflows for McAfee and Intel using these graphs, but in 2020 I was looking at Social Media data from Twitter, and the network was much denser and harder to use. I couldn’t see anything!
So, I thought, “What do I do?!” When I get stuck, I give myself challenges and at the time, someone on LinkedIn was doing her own project called like #30daysof___. I don’t remember exactly what it was called, but I thought, “I wonder how good I would be at this stuff if I sat down with it for a hundred consecutive days.” Then I just started learning, and every time I’d learn something interesting, I’d post a Day X of #100daysofnetworks on LinkedIn. I didn’t use Substack back then. I still have all that code on an ancient laptop in my closet, but not on Github.
But what did I learn and accomplish in the six years ever since the very first Day 1 of 100daysofnetworks?
I completed the first #100daysofnetworks project in 2020
I was given a book deal to write Network Science with Python because of this series
I was invited to launch a startup because of my Graph and NLP skills. I created an OSINT company in 2021.
I also created a data company in 2023.
I left my second company operationally and created an AI company in 2025.
My company progressions make sense. I was always aiming towards World AI. You cannot build world AI without OSINT knowledge and skill. My first company was purely OSINT, my second was purely data, and my third is World AI. As I have developed my World AI, I am able to train people on the things that I know how to do that all contribute to World AI. I learned many of these things during the process of writing for this series, including:
Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Keyword Analysis
Clustering (Unsupervised Machine Learning and Graph)
Classification (Supervised Machine Learning and Graph)
AI Engineering (ML and AI)
Network Science and Graph Theory
Whole Network Analysis
Egocentric Network Analysis
Community Detection
Path Analysis
Clustering (Unsupervised Machine Learning and Graph)
Classification (Supervised Machine Learning and Graph)
Temporal Network Analysis
Geospatial Analysis
How to see things on a map
How to put things on a map
How to use Graph Analysis and Geospatial Analysis together
Audio Analysis
How to detect who is speaking (Classification)
How to transcribe audio
Computer Vision
How to extract text from images and videos
How to transcribe what is happening in an image or video
How to predict what is showing in an image (Classification)
Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) uses different kinds of data, so the Data Science toolkit is not enough. If you want to be able to do programmatic OSINT, then you need to be capable of handling the different kinds of media and files that are used to show and describe the world, such as text, audio, and video. In big companies, you can be a specialist and ignore what you don’t like. OSINT folks are ninjas, not typically big company folks. We use everything we know how to use.
This blog has always been an OSINT blog, from before Day 1 in 2020, because back then I was using Twitter data to understand what was happening in the USA and world. This blog is an OSINT blog, and I explain things such as Natural Language Processing, Graph Analysis, Machine Learning, and AI Engineering, because I have done the work and the learning.
So what have I learned? Well, I didn’t do much of the above when I worked in Data Operations. I learned most of that on my own, doing my own independent research and learning. I learned NLP during #100daysofnlp, and that series led to #100daysofnetworks. I needed to get better at working with graph data because NLP was giving me a seemingly infinite supply. I had more data than I knew how to use. So, I worked on it and got good.
Different Fish, Not an Alien
I often say that I am a different fish. I forked off from Data Science in 2020, towards Network Science. I didn’t leave Data Science behind. I am more capable than ever. I became more. I sometimes feel like an alien that people can’t understand, but I think that is largely due to Network Science and OSINT skills not being common knowledge. I am the same Software Engineer, Data Engineer, and AI Engineer I have ever been. I just know how to do OSINT and a ton of things with Graph and NLP.
You should learn from me, not shy away from me, not be intimidated or think of me as different. All I did is show up day after day and continue to learn and build. As I say, builders build, and I don’t stop.
If you want to learn from someone who has done all of these things in the real world, you should learn from me. If you want a professor in a suit, you should learn from someone else. If you want to learn from a practitioner who can find out anything about anything, you should learn from me. If you want to learn how to turn the whole internet into a dataset and analyze it, you should learn from me. If you want to take control of your life and have power, you should learn from me.
Put simply, you should learn from me.
And I am very thankful to the 1,276 subscribers who do learn from me, and to the 30 who help keep this blog running. I am so thankful to my paid readers for supporting me this year. Life has been such chaos this year, but you showed up to support me and my writing, and I appreciate it. I will continue to look for more creative ways to provide value beyond my writing. I appreciate you.
What surprised me?
The biggest surprise to me of this latest iteration was how much music analysis I did, and the profound impact that had on me as a musician. A few years ago, I struggled to “memorize” the guitar fretboard. I thought I had to just memorize the whole thing, and my memory is not very good so I thought that this was beyond me. It was really discouraging me.
But then I found a book on memorizing the fretboard, and that helped me, so I bought another book after that on learning musical scales. There are dozens, and my memory is not great, but I felt emboldened.
I love what happened on Day 39.
I used Natural Language Processing and Data Science and made a Scale Similarity heatmap. After this, I realized that certain clusters of scales sounded more like each other and that I could use that insight to separate scales into families, and then just focus on learning the scales inside each.
I did that. I put the scales into sets and into envelopes, and then I worked on the sets for a long time.
In combination with memorizing the fretboard and unlocking musical scales, my lead guitar playing completely opened up. It was locked before this. I could play one solo from Jimi Hendrix and one solo from Kurt Cobain. That’s it.
Now I have my own YouTube channel and I post to it all the time, almost every day. You should follow it and hang out with me! I would love to do some live shows for you all.
Lately, I have been working on some Jimi Hendrix.
Lots of videos.
I’ve even uploaded a few of my own original songs that I am working on, such as Lalala. I like slow laid-back music. My biggest influences are Radiohead, Jimi Hendrix, Wilco, Phish, and The Grateful Dead, and I am also into many modern musicians such as Julia Jacklin, Strongboi, Cake, and more. Who do you listen to?
Here is my oldest playlist.
And here is my playlist of songs I like to play guitar along with.
Anyway, this blog led to the creation of my latest company as well, which led to reviving GrooveSeeker, which is totally about music.
And you can visit the website too.
Look at that. 9,883 UPCOMING EVENTS in the GrooveSeeker database currently. What kind of database? Temporal Knowledge Graph with a GraphRAG interface in front that powers an event paper and supports an entire city.
How do I do these things? By combining Software Engineering, Data Engineering, Data Science, Platform Engineering, and AI Engineering. How did I learn those things? On my own, and through this series. No manager ever paid for me to take these training courses and learn to be a Data Engineer. I learned Spark on my own. Nobody taught me OSINT. I am self-taught, and when you build to reach outcomes, you either reach them or you do not.
So, when you learn from me, you learn from someone who learned to do these things for practical purposes, such as:
Threat Detection and Analysis
Lead Generation
Trend Analysis
And many more (Substack is telling me I am almost out of space)
And you use those things to avoid danger or reach opportunities before your competition or adversaries.
If you want to learn from someone who does the work for real, you should learn from me. Enroll today.
Challenge Defeated!
In 2023, I felt like my skills were starting to atrophy, and I wanted to restart this series and get strong again. I more than succeeded, as this latest iteration led me to the creation of my Living Library of Knowledge and World AI as well as establishing my company.
I am not going to stop writing.
You can read yesterday’s article to learn more of what I have in mind. This is the last free article for a while, so please upgrade your subscription. I am getting back to OSINT after this article is published, and training is beginning.
Thanks again to my paying readers! To everyone else, please upgrade to a paid subscription to read my technical OSINT articles.
And I hope to see you in class. Enroll today!
We did it! #100daysofnetworks second iteration challenge has been successfully completed. Now we are in endgame, and things are always cooler in endgame. There is no end. I will write until I can no longer write. :)
ChatGPT helps me with edits. I only let it flag my embarrassing errors, like the fact that I can’t spell embarrassing without spell-check. While it was helping me, it mentioned this.
Yep, that’s right. That’s the story. I became curious because I had a large graph and lacked the skills to do anything with it in 2020. I got good, then wrote a book, created three companies, offer training, and I will never stop writing about how to use code and technology to do useful things.
Have a great weekend!
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