I've been circling a decision. The plan, if it's a plan, is to take an option away from myself. Make staying put cost something. Introduce enough pain that I can't keep doing what I'm doing. I don't know if that's a good idea. It's made me think about The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. Show up. Do the work. Try to overcome the Resistance. A professional…
A friend of mine passed away earlier this week. It was sudden, but not necessarily unexpected. He'd been diagnosed with cancer several months ago. It seemed like it would be manageable, until it wasn't. I've found that death is always a shock. It just hits differently depending on the circumstances. For me, it always makes me reflect on time. We know it's a finite resource, but…
It was a condensed explanation, but I came to understand him to mean you could stop at, not all, but most of the moments of your life, stop for one heartbeat and, no matter what the state of your head or heart, say This is happiness , because of the simple truth that you were alive to say it. — Niall Williams, This is Happiness I love this quote because it embodies my definition of happiness so…
For a while now, work hasn't felt meaningful. I used to love software engineering, but a lot has changed in the last few years, and somewhere in there the joy went out of it. Maybe I've changed too. Either way, I've caught myself mourning my chosen profession, trying to work out whether it's still salvageable. When people are not satisfied with their work, they usually want…
I assume pretty much no one except me will look at my website. So why even have it? Sure, it's handy to have my own digital space to reference things. But the real reason is that the possibility someone could read it makes me write better. It doesn't matter that no one does. Only that someone could. The structure necessary to explain an idea to someone else forces you to clarify it for…
Maybe I'm wrong, but at least on the internet, it feels like we're trying to minimize cognitive friction at all costs. I suspect that's because most major platforms incentivize attention and engagement at the expense of trust and quality. I think that's very misguided. Cognitive friction, the kind that comes from actually doing the work of thinking, is one of the most useful…
Like many people, I'm feeling some trepidation about AI, both at the macro and micro scales. I'm not even going to address the macro scale here - that's its own circus. But at the microscale, I use it pretty much every day. Most times it helps me get things done faster, which is a good thing. But I also usually feel very unsatisfied, even if I accomplished what I set out to achieve.…
...or at least that's what you'll think most of the time. And that's okay. If you finish it, that's a success. If someone else sees it, that's amazing. If someone else depends on it, that's astounding. The upside of making something great is simply so much higher than the downside of making something bad. So get comfortable making things you think are awful.
Beliefs are theories. Actions are experiments. Emotions are feedback. Not my words, but seems like a good heuristic to remember. As far as I'm concerned, the more quickly you can change your mind, the better.
A pizza night I make a bunch of pizza dough. I bring my Ooni to a friend's house. Everyone hangs out and eats pizza. It's pretty great. And this time I had help making the dough and forming it, so it was way easier. A cold School started the week prior, and my daughter got a little cold. It didn't seem to phase her. She bounced back in like a day. I'm assuming I got it from…
This is a post. It's not about anything in particular - maybe that's the point. No one is inspired all of the time, or a constant source of profound thoughts that must be shared. That's the performative aspect of the web I don't particularly like. The internet makes it very easy - and tempting - to infinitely polish your content. There's a time and place for that, but…
The idea is to add a line break after each substantial thought when writing in a markup language that joins consecutive lines with a space. This makes it easier to author, edit, and read in source, without changing the rendered output. The paragraph above looks like this in source: The idea is to add a line break after each substantial thought when writing in a markup language that joins…
Curation performed by a human is tremendously valuable, especially post 2000. This isn't a new idea, but an often overlooked one. Curation takes time, energy, and consistency, which is probably why it's been automated in so many aspects of our lives. But that just makes skilled human curation so much more valuable, and all the AI hype will only amplify this.