Come, read, and sink into the bliss that is mind pollution | Writing about tech, product, life, and more
In another world, I'm a writer. Not a writer of blog posts or code, but a write of fiction. In that world I went to the Arcadia University in Philadelphia and got an MFA in Creative Writing. In that world, I have a collection of short stories that was published at the height of the pandemic by a small, independent publisher. In that world, I'm not just another tech bro. I'm someone else entirely,…
Last year I wrote about how learning to code made it significantly harder for me to write creatively. I believe the brain uses the same part for both coding and for writing prose or poetry. This makes it very hard for me to be able to do both. As long as I'm coding and it is scratching the creative itch, it's nearly impossible for me to write something like a short story or a novel. That said,…
I've been exploring RSS a lot lately as I try to remove (or at least distance) myself from social media. There are many good options on the market, including self-hosted options, native mobile apps, and web apps. The problem I am facing is that I don't want yet another app. As I've been playing around with the Rust programming language more and more, I started building an RSS feed reader just to…
As I watch the Seattle Mariners and Detroit Tigers play in the 2025 Major League Baseball playoffs, I'm transported back in time. This year was the first time the Mariners won the American League West division in 24 years, but we have to go back even further. We have to go back to 1998. The summer of 1998 for me was one full of anxiety, excitement, and baseball. I had finished middle school and…
It's been nearly three years since I joined Farcaster, a "sufficiently decentralized" social protocol. I wrote about my tentative optimism about the protocol back then while acknowledging that I had been burned in the past when expectations ultimately didn't live up to reality. Unfortunately, Farcaster has failed to live up to the expectations I had three years ago. I'll explain why, but first,…
When I was first learning how to code, I naturally started with what I thought was the most accessible and visible part of coding—frontend. What a wake-up call that was to discover that frontend development wasn't just some HTML and CSS. But, I'm glad that's the path I took, even if it was difficult. Part of that path meant designing my own websites and apps, then designing apps for others, then…
I recently read an article that at first glance feels pretentious. It links to the Mensa Reading List for grades 9-12, and when you take a look at that list and try to imagine the average high school student picking up even one of the books on this list, you might start to roll your eyes. But as I read further, the article makes a compelling case that the list is important for how it challenges…
There have been dozens of hot takes in response to Replit CEO, Amjad Masad, saying that he doesn't think people should learn to code . While this may be considered another such take, I'm actually much more interested in the alignment AI causes with product- and engineering-capable people. So, I guess, let's get this out of the way up front. Should you still learn to code? Yes. With that out of the…
When you think about services that allow you to create content online, the services usually fall into two categories: All of the content, from everyone, lives on the platform's main domain (example: Twitter/X) The content lives on a subdomain of one of the platform's domains (example: Glitch, Netlify, Substack) In fact, this pattern dates back to the earliest days of the consumer web. In the…
I’m old enough to remember MapQuest. To me, it was ground-breaking technology. You’d head to your computer, wait for the dial-up internet connection to finish its series of whirs and pops, then you’d enter a starting address and a destination address. MapQuest would then design the most optimal route for you and include some satellite imagery of the path. It would also include turn-by-turn…