My personal projects and professional focus has been primarily in software engineering. Being able to make things that help people, including myself, accomplish more is a joy that lights up my brain.
— Many an engineer has heard tales of Valve's "flat" organization structure — what is fact, what is fiction, and how does it actually work? An annotated copy of the 2012 First Edition of Valve's Employee Handbook.
— The rubber hits the road on ColabFold! I hope that's rubber I'm smelling — although it may be the computer. A replication attempt of a protein fold figure in K. Pedram et al (2023).
— Amaze (or bore) your friends and family by picking up on a hot new hobby that's all the rage — protein folding! An annotated starter to the 2021 paper "ColabFold - Making protein folding accessible to all"
— Do humans have a role in software development anymore? Absolutely — but we need to rethink what it means to program. An modern review of Peter Naur's 1985 essay "Programming as Theory Building"
— City, with natural stripes — or nature, with city stripes? Annotations for A Pattern Language, and tracking public opinion of where Americans want to live over the past 50 years.
— When it comes to collecting data, there's a fine line between making a good site and making an invasive product. To make this site more useful, I want to collect enough data to improve, but never enough to undermine anybody's privacy.
— Is Jane Street run by soccer-loving ants? Inconclusive. We *can* conclude that they're fans of Markov Chains, though — an invaluable tool for understanding complex data structures.
— The beginning of a topological review of the 1977 urban design and architecture reference book A Pattern Language, and a journey to understand Earth's greatest graph: the Earth, itself.
— Annoyed by Obsidian Live Preview over-padding headers and aggressively indenting? Some snippets to help keep your notes from jumping around, so you can focus on actually writing them.
— I killed 4 of my blogs trying to implement MDX support. Will this one be next?
Using MDX with Quartz to create interactive graphs, diagrams, and demos — clear as day.
— Notes from learning Event Storming for domain-driven design. Thoughts on phases,
color-coded chaos, and how to transition from fast pitches to full products.
— I'm learning to live with the systems that stole my beloved em-dash.
A season dedicated to negotiating how to live with the agentic models that have turned my career upside-down.
— An engineer-focused primer on the mechanisms that drive Large Language Models. Basics on how we got here,
how they work, and how to use them without feeling an apocalyptic dread.
— Classifying opinions as "strong" or "weak" to stop wasting hours in fruitless engineering debates.
How consensus can beat being "right", and an open letter for the tactically apathetic.
— PSA: Check if your laptop needs an LCD for POST before removing the screen.
Learned this the hard way after 5 hours and a fried motherboard. Learn from my dumb mistakes.
— Building a Raycast plugin to schedule website blocks — because checking news "just one more time" destroys flow.
Automate SelfControl and self control: take your laptop back.
— Why I stopped hoarding 60%-done drafts and started publishing messy thoughts instead.
Embracing digital gardening, from-chaos-to-cultivated, and a healthy dose of imperfection.
— How over-engineering killed a 3-month remaster of an old ROBLOX game.
Looking back at the depth of Dunning-Kruger, and how good code doesn't make a good game.
— I've learned so much in my career — so why do I finish fewer projects than I used to?
Over-engineering: it's easier to be bad at something on accident than on purpose.
— Stop reprocessing your entire dataset every time new data arrives.
A practical guide to Spark Structured Streaming with code examples and cost logic.
— Efficiency: spending six hours building a web scraper to avoid five minutes of daily work.
Automating a business simulation because checking in is for chumps.
— Being famous online in 2009 is the highest high I'll ever reach. A love letter to the coolest dork I know, hatemail for client-side exploits, and a limitless supply of Monopoly dollars.
— My college presentation on the Gale-Shapley paper, recorded on an iPad, like a true professional.
Non-market environments, matchmaking lattices, and gratitude for good professors.
— A first foray into network visualization: messy graphs, abject terror.
Early data viz experiments searching for supply loops. Bad graphs; interesting questions.