Welcome to Peter Ashley's website

Resume Summary

Favorite management resources

These books help make a better workplace and world:

• Leadership that Gets Results Daniel Goleman - Effective leaders must understand the key leadership styles, their advantages and drawbacks, their own natural tendencies, and which approach best suits different situations. By mastering this awareness, leaders can adapt their style to inspire teams, drive performance, and navigate challenges with greater impact.

• Bringing out the Best in People Aubry Daniels - Many associate behaviorism in psychology with manipulation, but effective managers recognize it as a tool for alignment and motivation. To build high-performing teams, management must ensure that reinforcement strategies support the organization's mission. Top performers thrive when their roles align with intrinsic rewards, and great managers prioritize hiring the right people, fostering strong performance, and eliminating draining, low-value tasks. For example, Southwest Airlines selects flight attendants primarily for their passion for customer interaction and service‐ensuring a natural fit that enhances both employee satisfaction and company success.

• Seven Transformations of Leadership David Rooke and William R. Torbert - Human development can be analyzed through distinct stages of personal and group "action logic" shaped by an individual's internal motivations and identity. This framework helps explain how priorities evolve as a person progresses toward higher and rarer levels of understanding and leadership.

• Thinking Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman - This book is more relevant today than ever. A fundamental flaw in human thinking often disrupts meaningful discourse and collaboration. As Kahneman explains, our System 1 thinking‐our fast, intuitive, and unconscious reasoning‐quickly settles on a single valid perspective and then stops, overlooking the many other ways to approach complex issues. Without awareness of how our minds operate, we become defensive and confrontational, rather than engaging in the deeper discussions about priorities, perspectives, and values that are essential for mutual understanding and effective solutions.

• Good Strategy/Bad Strategy Richard Rumelt - I've been interested in strategy for some time, exploring classics like Porter, Sun Tzu, and Harvard Business Review articles. So when I learned that the Secureworks PM team was reading this book, I picked up a copy. What makes it stand out is its clear framework for identifying "bad strategy". Many business presentations claiming to be strategy aren't truly strategic, and this book effectively explains why‐offering valuable insights to avoid the common pitfalls of limited mindset and selecting tactics or goals rather than using strategy as a process.

Certifications

AWS Architecture Cert

Prompt engineering

Try my guided car diagnostic tool, Auto AI Doctor, which calls ChatGPT from an AWS Lamdba backend.
I wrote this on a Sunday with ChatGPT to experiment with guided prompts with user input.

Building a Chrome extension to fill forms in 5 minutes

Designing a serverless AWS backend API for a home automation system

Exploration of protection from secure edge and zero trust network systems

Perils of buy and hold investing and using trend following as a diversifier

Patents

Commercial Offerings

Delinea products. Privilege Manager - elevation justification form

LLM Training Exercise

Github Fast.AI deep learning based log classifier

Results: Training and test prediction

epoch train_loss valid_loss accuracy time 0 1.787571 1.282640 0.750000 00:08 epoch train_loss valid_loss accuracy time 0 0.975311 0.967853 0.880952 00:12 1 0.814063 0.392149 0.976190 00:11 2 0.684892 0.138656 0.988095 00:12 3 0.585866 0.089036 0.988095 00:12

This is a Linux file with probability 0.9866

('Linux', tensor(5), tensor([3.2136e-03, 1.0244e-03, 1.6429e-06, 9.5284e-05, 7.1151e-03, 9.8660e-01, 5.0567e-04, 1.3690e-03, 3.9699e-06, 7.4702e-05]))

SimpleSecretService.com

A complete serverless AWS API and dynamic website for creating and using API keys and code secrets. Visit SimpleSecretService.com

Realistic Financial Planning Tool (thought experiment)

I've started working on a small financial planning tool that will provide more valid results than simplistic fixed or monte carlo investment return based tools. Existing tools dangerously underestimate true risks of maintaining financial independence based on paper assets. These mockup graphics based on real inflation and investment return data starting in 1950 show how the fixed 4% rule fails as assets draw down to zero. The second set of graphs show taking withdrawals using a different rule, taking 4% of current assets, with behavior where income will vary with market prices but never draw down to zero. The need line shown in black projects how expenses would increase based on inflation occuring after 1950. Neither projection shows income keeping up with inflation given existing spending.

Fixed 4% rule projection. Income (left) with inflation adjusted need shown by black line and assets (right)

Variable 4% of assets projection. Income with need (left) and assets (right)

Here's a pitch deck slide (request access) and initial architecture. Key features would include simulation using realistic market return backtesting as well as being able to apply different spending rules.

Job Hunting Tools

Tips and secrets article on Medium

Start here with my huge list of job hunting tips and secrets

Next Question - Simple behavioral question interviewing practice

Use the Next Question tool to practice behavioral questions. The tool presents a random STAR question and you can type a keyword or answer and press enter to advance to another question. Some of the questions are based on Amazon leadership principles. The tool was generated with this chat. You could download it and run it as a file from your own computer if you want to customize the questions. LinkedIn also has a good practice tool.

Form Filler - Chrome extension which pastes commonly used values into fields

With this tool you configure commonly requested values like your linked in profile URL, portfolio URL, address, throwaway workday accounts password, etc. Use the popup toolbar item to paste into a field or to the clipboard. You can right click and the value will paste into a field (sometimes). It's still a bit buggy because of all the form constructions. Click to download. Check readme file for installation and usage instructions

Highlight Bookmarks Search - Chrome extension which searches bookmarks with right-click on highlighted word

Use this tool to search easily in bookmarks. Highlight a word, right-click and select new context menu item to search. Or select toolbar icon to search. Matching bookmarks will appear in a popup. Press any key to close window. Bookmark the jobs descriptions you've applied to or evaluated. Click to download. Check readme file for installation and usage instructions

Save as PDF Macro - Add this macro into your resume DOCM file to one click save as PDF.

DeJobVu - Chrome extension which does a fuzzy search on bookmarks to match prior jobs

Seen this job before? DeJobVu analyzes the current page URL and your bookmarks to find most similar items. This can help you identify that the job post on the current page is a duplicate, repost, different description of same thing, etc. Bookmark the jobs descriptions you've applied to or evaluated. Behind the scenes this tool calculates word frequency scores on bookmarks and combines them with a dictionary with word frequency published by MIT to make a ranking metric. You can also drop in a "power word" which will boost the rank of any results with a match for that string. Click to download. Check readme file for installation and usage instructions