Horticulture is my catch-all term for the practice of digital gardening– maintaining my knowledge, notes, and projects like tending a garden.
Most of the time, horticulture relates to maintaining this blog, along with other personal systems that either maintain my ability to manage my own life, and, in turn, might require their own maintenance over time.
I also use it, in general, when referring to software gardening– treating software development like agricultural work, that grows organically over time.
— The kickoff post for my Season of Stamps: exploring new places, meeting new people, and putting the final stamp of approval on a back catalog of projects worth publishing.
— 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.
— Our lives are all dominated by a little graph in our hearts — and sometimes, that graph gets wacky. A review of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's "Theory of Stupidity", part of his larger ~1943-1945 work "Letters and Papers from Prison."
— 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.
— Looking back at my year-long attempt to build up long-lasting habits.
A retrospective on routines, remote work transitions, and learning the art of slow-and-steady.
— 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.
— 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.
— I'm embracing being wrong on the internet in an effort to learn in public.
A disclaimer on digital gardening, dead pixels, and the fear of terminal online-ness.
— My life devolves into sleep-eat-procrastinate cycles without structure—I call this "The Goblin."
Productivity tools, hating on hustle culture, and a new definition for horticulture.
— 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.
— "Fight or flight" is a rough way to treat white-collar life. My Season of Rhythm is dedicated to
transitioning from constant sprints to slow-and-steady.
— 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.