Small essays I keep returning to — about code, teaching, patience, and building a life with your hands. Not advice. Just what I currently believe.
Everyone in tech is in a hurry, and most of what the hurry produces has to be rebuilt within a year. I've noticed that the projects I'm still proud of are the ones where I let the problem sit with me for a while before I touched the keyboard.
Speed is a fine tool. But it's a tool, not a virtue. The virtue is care — and care sometimes moves fast, and sometimes it sits quietly and reads the docs twice.
on buildingAfter training hundreds of students, I've learned that almost nobody is actually stuck on the syntax. They're stuck on the story they tell themselves — "I'm not a math person," "I started too late," "everyone else gets this faster."
My real job as a teacher is to sit next to that story, put a breakpoint in it, and show them the stack trace: where the belief came from, and that it isn't load-bearing. The JavaScript sorts itself out after that.
on teachingNot someone smart — someone kind. A kind reader forgives your weird variable name but is quietly hurt when the function lies about what it does. Writing for a kind reader keeps you honest without making you clever.
The same rule works for poems, messages, and documentation. Most writing goes wrong when we try to impress instead of trying to be understood.
on craftBeing CTO of my own product taught me more in months than years of working on slices of other people's systems. When the database design, the UI, the deployment, and the angry user at 11pm are all yours, you stop having opinions and start having judgment.
Everyone should ship one thing where there's no one else to blame. It's terrifying, and it's the fastest education available.
on ownershipBoth start with a vague feeling that something should exist. Both are revised until the extra words fall away. Both fail in the same manner — not loudly, but by being almost right.
I stopped treating my writing and my engineering as separate lives. They're the same practice with different compilers.
on wholeness— more thoughts arrive as they're ready. this page grows slowly, on purpose. —
The same ideas, fewer arguments, more line breaks.
Read the poems →