Blog
The place where your attention belongs
An essay on how every text you type compacts your thoughts, fears, and dreams into sentences, and on turning that attention toward studying and transforming yourself.
My favorite way of using a computer
An essay on treating AI less like a tool and more like a spaceship, on trusting it to guide part of your life while still directing where it goes.
How I learned to use volume as a way to learn, in content and life
On using volume as a learning tool in content and in life: ship fast, eliminate what does not work, and only go all in on quality once you have found something that does.
How to create everything you want... don't
An essay on why cheap creation shifts the real constraint to attention, and why building something meaningful still comes down to reaching people.
Protect self-delusion
An essay on needing enough irrational belief to start before the evidence exists, and enough humility to change direction once it arrives.
Notes on an Open MCT build tool
On a CLI that sets up NASA's Open MCT from a config file instead of a custom fork like JPL's VISTA.
The cycles of social media
On how every social network, creator, and content format eventually moves through a cycle, as what feels native to the internet today is replaced by new formats born from how people communicate.
What is the meaning of life?
An essay on tying fulfillment to achievement, why you should be willing to radically change what you believe, and letting old parts of yourself die.
We're so back at writing
Draft on why writing is having a comeback in the age of AI.
Staying more physically active
How a home gym, a real gym, a nutritionist and a calorie tracking app helped me feel more active over the past two years.
Technical tips for designing for Apple devices
Tips from my journey learning Swift UI and Apple Design Guidelines
Software running in space
A thread on why satellites run AI software onboard instead of downloading every image back to Earth to process it here.
Love as the medium
An essay on why love, gratitude, and appreciation are the safe spaces where the next generation of software will move.
You and Me
A poem.
Scissors over paper. Message over slop.
Video slop is flooding the feed, and a good message still beats it, however rough the video looks.
Choosing hard things
A blog post on why it's better to do hard things in life.
Remotion is coming for everything
A small callout on Remotion.
It's up to us
A poem.
Of days yet to come
A poem.
Who are you
A poem.
Searching
A poem.
Catastrophe
A poem.
The portfolio career
On having too many interests to pick one profession, and the mix of skills that turned into my portfolio career.
Build your next website with Astro
A review and explainer on using Astro to build personal websites.
Enhance your READMEs with native Mermaid diagrams
On using GitHub's native Mermaid support to give a README clear diagrams of a system's core parts.
Let's embrace the future 2022 gave us
My last post of 2022: from GPT-2 to ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot, what generative AI changed this year, and the limits I think it will cross next.
Lessons on brainstorming
Tips for running more effective brainstorming sessions: push past your first ideas, go for quantity, hold off on judging, and keep your ideas somewhere safe.
The impact of creating: to try, to fail, and to learn
How I went from building without learning to learning without building, and the loop I use now to balance both.
My experience going from PHP to JavaScript
How I started programming with PHP, switched to JavaScript without really planning it, and why exciting projects are what make knowledge stick.
Is a startup the right environment for me?
How one chapter of a free O'Reilly book, read on a bus ride, changed what I thought startups were like, and why I ended up joining one at 19.
Understanding neural networks with no prior knowledge
A from-scratch explanation of how neural networks work, starting from calculators and flowcharts and ending with a network that learns to read handwritten digits.