Latest writings and thoughts
I recently got a new phone after my last phone was kinda destroyed…and realized to get into my office I would need to download an app to get in. There’s no physical keys given out, so I gotta do a few things. Simple enough but first I’d have to… Download the app Sign in to the app, the app only has magic links, no password, so gotta go to a browser and sign into my email My email requires a…
I recently took a flight with United, and out of boredom decided to look at the snack menu. I noticed that there were plenty of snacks that you could pay for - normal - but the funny thing was you could also purchase those snacks with airline miles at a horrible redemption rate of 1$ = 100 points. This got me wondering, what if we instead used calories as a measure of redemption value instead of…
Bit of a shortie… An important lesson in our current age of limited context windows and rot is your code should be cleaner than it was before. Clean in this case means, delete all the dead code you have lying around. Seriously. I know us developers already strive for clean code where we get rid of old functions and old UI elements in our personal projects. But at work it can be a bit more terse to…
I was deep into investigating a performance issue with Letta Desktop lately; the story was same old same old, the greater the use, the slower the product. This seemed pretty obvious to me probably just some long running for loop, or unoptimized code. What came to my realization was that actually the issue has nothing to do with my code (well, it did still, but, it was based on a bad assumption).…
You need a webring! Yes, you! If you have (1) a personal website and (2) n+0 friends, you should set up a webring. What is a webring? Well its just a circular linked list of websites that have some topic assiged to it. It could be a hobby, a passion, or just your friends! The lore behind webrings is pretty deep, I would read more about it here linky . But to be honest, all you need to know is it's…
On the eve of America’s 250th birthday I wanted to reflect to think about my position in this nation. As of this week, the Supreme Court of this nation had reaffirmed the intention of the 14th amendment, which had been reiterated without a doubt that: Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of…
Lines, Commits, Code I see them stream in, I submit I know the course, I know the plan The implementation is out of my hands I see it go, productive with ease But is there any meaning to me The lines, commits, code All had meaning to me The course of the framework built The ifs, ors loops and ands No longer familiar, automated by claws, agents and amps What am I to do when I sit down when those…
I got a new phone number, it’s great! I no longer have to deal with a deluge of political spam from when I donated to a politican 10 years ago! No longer I have pig butchers and cons text me about meeting for some tech event nearby. I no longer get fake texts from robinhood, coinbase and any other website that was hacked in the last 5 years either. It's great! ✦✦ I got a new number, it kinda…
Going to the gym after work is an exercise in patience and vision, you need to be patient for the a bench or machine to be available, and you need the vision to see what even is going to be available. Will you be the guy who stands an inch behind someone halfway through their set, or will you hope and pray theres an opening with no suitors. Theres plenty of faux pas at the gym, being on your phone…
Restaurants in San Francisco sure love exclusivity. I got a random email from OpenTable from TBD, a new restaurant taking over the old Akkikos space on Bush - still run by the Akkiko’s team, but now focusing on izakaya style food instead of sushi One of the dishes I tried was their karrage hot chicken. It came with a sauce bottle with their secret spicy sauce. Sour and sweet, it’s a great edition…
On the intersection of Market and Bush lies Mechanics monument Plaza, an unassuming urban space with a table tennis court. Across the plaza sits Boichick bagel, a very yummy place to grab some schmere. On a day earlier this month I had went to pick up some bagels for work, I usually ride down and prop my bike nearby and lock up, but this time I was in a rush, so I propped my bike by the door. I…
Cursor 3 came out - it looks cool, lots of nifty agentic features - but something kinda burns in the back of my head. Who are the audience for these things? I was originally going to write about the two new visions for software development interfaces, one, like codex where it defers all agency to your agent. They let you open your code in an IDE, but really the goal is to maximize your agent to do…
Minecraft just has their annual Minecraft Live: their annual showcase of the "big update" of the year. I still play Minecraft occasionally when I’m feeling bored and creative, so I keep attention from time to time. One thing I noticed from this year’s announcement was the addition of the Sulfur Cube. The sulfur cube is kinda strange, it’s a mob like the existing slime, where it bounces around, but…
I stopped using instagram a while ago, but one thing I did was keep my account around so that there would be a less likely chance that someone could impersonate me with a new account. One thing I noticed, the longer I’ve had my account inactive, the more emails I get from Meta about attempted password recovery, attempted logins or general signs of someone trying to crack my account. I was chatting…
Outside Lands (OSL) just dropped their linup for their 2026 show, and one curious thing seems a bit present when looking at all the artists. I'll give you a second to tell me what's interesting below: Ok, it's a bit hard, but most of the people listed are electronic artists. Now, there's nothing wrong with electronic; I like electronic music; the bay loves electronic music, they made a whole…
When I was early in my career, I often looked at case studies with uninterest. If I wanted to test software, I'd just do it. There's a limited time cost to me, I could install it, see if it works, and if it doesn't, just move on. Now, 10 years later, it's a bit different, priorities have shifted and I do look at case studies for software with some weight. I do want to know how our peers are using…
I got a very nice email from one of our software vendors congratulating us on a new launch of a product. I thought that this was a good email-opener and attention grabber, it means that a human definitely looked at our stuff, I should take a peep at theirs. The big problem though was that in their email they were talking about how we could use their tools to monitor our usage of one of our…
(I am not a lawyer) An interesting law is now in effect in California - AB316. The law is as follows: The people of the State of California do enact as follows: SECTION 1. Section 1714.46 is added to the Civil Code, to read: 1714.46. (a) “Artificial intelligence” means an engineered or machine-based system that varies in its level of autonomy and that can, for explicit or implicit objectives,…
A little bit after my 28th birthday I went to get a regular blood draw. I always had issues around my blood draws, usually just fainting after the procedure was over, nothing too crazy. I went in as usual and prepared my arm, the draw went a little longer than usual, I needed more blood than usual for some reason, and I began to fall asleep. The sleep was not like normal sleep, it felt so warm, I…
This is not the typical story of haufbraus that many a local newspaper have covered, this is a bit deeper! If you take the 38 down Geary on the corner of Van Ness you would be hard-pressed to not notice a strange blue building placard with mid-century signage: Tommy’s Joynt. A favorite hangout spot of Metallica and purveyor of meats and breads aplenty, one could be mystified by its unique…
(This article is severely delayed because I forgot it in drafts) Over the summer I had the opportunity to work with two bright young minds at Letta~here's what happened: We decided to setup a internship program this year because we felt it could be an interesting and low-risk experiment in the effectiveness of interns in early stage startups, as well as give back to those early into their career…
Word of the Day - Postequital Postequital (adj) - Describes a person or actions of a person whose startup equity actually became valuable. Can be described as behavior similar to a mid life crisis but with greater purchasing power; common examples include opening a store or business that only loses money, working in the government to “fix it” or becoming an artist. It signifies that someone’s…
The common Friday morning schedule for most startup employees with reasonable leadership is to pick out the food they want to consume for the next week. Group-buy food delivery apps have hit it big with startups, and the one I work for is no different. Most weeks it's pretty standard, visit forkable.com , pick what meals I want to eat usually by how appetizing it looks or the description, and…
You ever beat a game and then unlock gun/sword/magic power that makes everything super easy to destroy and then you get bored of the game? I’ve been adopting using AI agents at work to help ship features. We have a pretty established codebase with very strict linting, formatting testing and e2e tests, so building apps with [the company I work for’s open source coding agent] has become a breeze and…
I think I have a kinda overkill analytics stack for my website. I host an Umami Analytics instance on Vercel (0$/m), and host the data on a database on a vps that I spend 15$/mo on (I use it for other things too, dw). I say it's overkill because realistically, I just want a view counter, I don't really need anything else, knowing what country my readers come from, cool but not changing my life.…
I just took a 12 hour flight, and on my 6 hours of being awake, I realized there’s a few things that people miss out on that makes their flight a bit nicer. Foot pedals in the restroom Don’t you hate it when you try to push your trash into the airplane restroom bin, it feels so nasty, but if you ever pay attention to the image on the trash lid, it hints there’s another way. Most modern planes have…
My coworker Cameron told me lately that I was a sandwich hater, but I actually do love sandwiches, below is a running list of my favorite sandwich spots in the city. I just like good sandwiches. This list is not every sandwhich place I've been to, just the ones I think are great, no particular order. (No breakfast sandwich places, that's a different list) Sandy's Muffuletta 1457 Haight St, San…
I just added comments section to the blog part of this site. It's powered by utterances ! This literally took me 1 minute to set up. It's really fast, and as you noticed, you don't actually need to use your exact github repo to host the comments, the comments are all stored on this repo . Very nice, post your thoughts below! Soon, I'll think of adding bluesky and anon comments Your browser does…
As we approach the 2030’s, we’re reaching a point where there won’t be someone alive today who had been around at the same time as someone who was alive in the 18th century (1701-1800). The oldest person around now was born in 1909 [1] , and it seems like there have been verifiable amounts of people who had been born in in the 1700s who made it to 110 [2] . Given that the absolute longevity of a…
Between March and April of 2025, I went to three hackathons as a representative of the startup I currently work for. As someone who grew up around hackathons and fell in love with computer science through it, I've been big advocate of those events. The startup I am currently at is pretty small, at the time only 5 employees including the founders. But we had a product and a platform, and we were…
I was checking out this software called utteranc.es , thinking about how I can add a comment section to this blog. Not sure if I'll stick with it or implement it. But one thing I noticed is that the copy representing "sites using utterances" are two dead* sites. Blogs can die very fast, utterances was written in 2017, now it's 2025, those example sites are dead. Do I think my website will last…
I was watching one of my favorite YouTube series' called Jetlag last week when I saw the contestants Sam and Tom Scott struggling to name 100 women. This is most likely not out of their specific implicit biases against women, but just the human brain unable to deal with loading 100 things at once. The best way to tackle this challenge is split it up and name 3-5 women per first letter in the…
Knowing my way around technology was easy for me; I was born in the late 90's and grew up in the Silicon Valley. My dad was a software engineer with a hobby of collecting the latest and greatest tech, and my mom was an academic who sparked my interest in research and just lokking things up. I was using a desktop around 8-9 years old to make “websites” in Word and trawl Wikipedia for fun articles.…
For the length of my career in startups, both as an interviewee and interviewer, interviews are way too long and way too uninteresting. Today I see startups attempting to do on sites that last multiple days, or take homes that only take “3-4” hours to complete, or even worse, making a founding engineer do sets of leetcode problems to get signal. But why are some startup interview processes are so…
In 2025 I started using Eleventy (11ty) for building my personal website. 11ty fundamentally is a tool that takes in an input directory of files and ouputs them to a dist directory. The parsing of those files are controlled in a file called eleventy.config.js . That's it! It's super extensible, and below are some cool things I do with 11ty. How I organize my code I structure my 11ty code as below…
Building real-time applications on the web has never been easier. In this post, I'll explain how you can use server-sent events , or SSE for short, to get real-time data for your web applications. At the end of this article you should know: What a server-sent event is How to listen to server-sent events on the browser How to send server-sent events from your server This tutorial is for those who…