About
Shelly Blake-Plock (b. 1974) is a musician, technologist, and entrepreneur. He was born in New Jersey and grew up in Baltimore, Maryland.
Obligatory 3rd person description…
Shelly began playing acoustic guitar in 1988. Since then, he has played in numerous bands and ensembles both in the studio and on the road. A prolific hometaper, producer, and songwriter, Shelly has contributed to over 50 productions and has written at least 500 songs.
Working as a teacher throughout the Oughts, he found a passion for blending creative problem solving with participatory media. This led to a series of adventures in writing and in designing new courses — including for the Johns Hopkins University School of Education where he received his masters degree.
In 2008, he started up his first consultancy and in 2012 became co-executive director of a nascent non-profit community technology program in Baltimore. In 2014, he and a team of Hopkins ex-pats co-founded Yet Analytics, which over the years has become a trusted developer of open source software that is implemented in enterprise learning and training programs worldwide.
Shelly has served as principal investigator on applied research projects in the space of synthetic data, and has contributed to research on data standards, streaming data architectures, and innovations in the instrumentation of learning environments.
In his advisory work, Shelly has helped startups and creative people in a variety of fields ranging from artificial intelligence to advanced simulations. As a mentor, he is an alum of the I-Corps program at the National Science Foundation.
He lives in Maryland with his wife — the architect MJ Wojewodzki. They have three grown children, a dog, and several cats. Shelly spends most of his time arguing about baseball.
Statement
“It took me decades to come to terms with the fact that I did not have to segment out the different aspects of my personality from my artistic and professional lives. In a way, I finally just decided to give up on trying to make myself more consumable for others. I’d wasted so many braincells trying to make it all make sense — in effect, trying to shoehorn my story into something that would be more digestible for others.
Worrying about all of this over coffee one afternoon, my friend John admonished me to quit trying to make it all make sense: ‘The contradiction is the content,’ he said.
And so, as I’ve entered my sixth decade, I’ve decided that I would no longer try to make myself look reasonable and conformant to others. I’d just work on the work — whether that took me to new strange places in music or whether it led to suddenly obvious ideas in the research space or whether it led to new opportunities to work with amazing visionaries on crazy projects.
I am here now, contradictions and all.”
Let me know if you’d like to chat.
