Personal blog and thoughts by Oliver Gilan
When your friends host events you should take whimsical, candid photos. Hosting is time consuming and you’re often stuck in the middle of the action. It’s always nice when after a busy event I get photos from friends — photos from their POV. These photos end up being some of the best and they’re the ones I come back to over and over again.
On the joy and whimsy of looking at things.
Awe is an underrated emotion. Other emotions tend to excite the nervous system while awe calms it down, improving your body’s regulation and baseline functions. Awe is uniquely allocentric and focuses you on things beyond yourself. In this way awe simultaneously grounds you in reality while taking care of your body. ~~ I believe in divine beauty. I don’t know how I would define other than the…
Gaining 10lbs of lean muscle over 3 months.
Taking ta-1 to improve immune function.
I still cannot eat dairy and gluten and my immune system still feels like this lingering problem to be wary of. I’ve overcome the years of debilitating immune problems and I’m mostly healthy now, without the need for immune-suppressing drugs. I can exercise, substitutions for dairy and gluten are plentiful these days, and overall things are going well and I have more pressing things to care about…
How to maximize the impact of your work and get the most out of your time at a startup.
I found this band recently and have been listening to them non-stop. Their music makes me think of a slower life, full of romance and love.
Relationships are like gardens. You cannot plant the flowers once, you need to be constantly tending to them, pruning weeds, fertilizing the soil. Love grows from the obligations you willingly enter into together and the work you do for each other. Now the work I’m left with is just for me. I have a company to build, friendships to nurture, and a body and spirit to grow. I’ve become very…
shot on iphone
AI is not yet improving in a runaway fashion, but most jobs in the economy will see a significant level of disruption from AI in the next few years.
In a world where intelligence is too cheap to meter, is the generic chat box the final UI? I argue that the best products of this generation will go deeper, and reset the frame entirely on workflows.
Most of the productivity gains from AI and other DevTools of the past decade have not made their way to the engineers working on large, mature codebases. If we want to make our biggest companies more productive we need a better system of record for the engineering org.
Cloud hosting is one of the biggest markets in the world and it's right there for the taking.
There are moments in life that are more than just mere memories of events. They are memories of feelings stored in the body itself and they are what makes a life full.
In the summer of 2019 I became violently ill and lost the ability to eat gluten. Over the past two years I've slowly gained some tolerance back and I outline my plan herein to regain full tolerance for eating gluten.
Nearly a million people in the US suffer from total kidney failure yet only 20,000 kidneys are available for transplant each year. The kidney crisis is only getting worse and needs a revolution to solve it.
Taking stock of my progress.
The NFL acts as a microcosm for business and can teach us lessons about building successful organizations from small startups to large companies. Understanding these lessons will shape the choices and effectiveness of both leadership and ICs and can radically alter the outcomes of a business.
It's time for a new era in my life. I'm now in the arena.
Winter brings with it hard times and dark days but I am remembering what it means to find beauty in every season and what type of life allows me to do that.
Software used to be the highest leverage differentiator between tech companies and the rest. I'm not so sure that's the case anymore.
Over the past 3 years I fought for my life against a failing body. Now I'm trying to live with the weakened state I find myself in.
Fenyman had a concept of 12 questions which he contemplated for much of his professional career, constantly adding new facts and insights to each category over time. This allowed him to progress along many axes at once over long time periods until the accumulation of understanding in any given question reached the point where others considered it a breakthrough. Here are the 6 questions I'm…
Thinking short and long is the act of focusing on the day-to-day tasks required to move yourself forward while also zooming out and effectively strategizing against a longer term vision. When building a company you will need to do both effectively but in the trough of sorrow you will need to do both at the same time all while the pressure and problems you face seem to multiply endlessly.
The world can feel like a rational and deterministic place completely indifferent to your emotions but that's not always the case. When it comes to competition, learning something new, achieving something ambitious, or even changing who you are your belief can be the difference between winning and losing.
It doesn't take much to become better than average at anything in life. The most important step is the first. Just show up and start and the rest will follow.
The term software crisis was coined in 1968 to identify the inability of software development to keep up with the rapidly growing usage and requirements of computing. Today the crisis continues with poor software more common than good software and failure more common than success.
No-Code tools like Webflow, Bubble, Adalo, etc. are all the rage these days. Despite this I believe they all have a fundamental problem to overcome: if they are simple enough for non-engineers to use they aren't powerful enough but if they are powerful enough they become too complex and a real engineer will most likely just use code instead.
2023 is coming. The big areas of focus for me in this new year will be career, health, adventure, and mind.
Notes on the rise of AI and large language models.
Your brain can only focus on one thing at a time. Multitasking is just an excercise in context switching and the more important a task the costlier it is to switch contexts.
Effective teams consciously engineer how knowledge flows through their organization. For tech teams, building this internal knowledge system requires effective documentation.
Working on the right thing is as important as working hard but when a startup is rapidly growing how do you determine where to best focus your efforts?
In the debate of work-life balance versus work-life integration it seems as though balance is winning out over passion as more and more people view life as the hours spent between clocking in and clocking out. Why is this viewpoint dominating and does it lead to a fulfilling life?
Hugo is a static site generator built in Golang. Fast compile times and a powerful templating engine makes it a powerful option for creating sites like a blog.