My General Theory of Reading relies on the masses to sort out the literature with true staying power, so I don’t end up wasting my time reading hot garbage. This means that usually my reading is a few decades or centuries behind. I only want the stuff that has passed…

On a crisp spring day in Illinois, my fourth grade teacher Mrs Dare conspired with my mother, my own flesh and blood, to give me an extra batch of homework assignments. They claimed it was just one extra homework assignment, but it turned out the be the largest project I…

One thing a week. Turns out, it was harder to whittle down than I thought. This was a fun exercise. I know I’m two weeks early, but honestly it’s just because I was so excited to do it at all. I dug through my Evernotes, Goodreads highlights, camera rolls, Trello…

Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve been hearing the phrase “hell yeah or no” more and more over the last couple of years. In the tech startup space, it seems to have become the new mantra. In Derek Sivers’ “Anything You Want” (which I believe is where the phrase originates)…

I have been an early part of three startups, so uh, yah — consider me “an expert”. In the first, I was a junior programmer. I had no hand in decision making: not about the tech, not about the people, not about the culture. I wrote code and watched other…

Dire enough for you? Let me explain where I’m coming from: for the programmer and non-programmer alike. I have been using a product called GitHub Copilot for one week. This “free” program (though highly expensive in the currency of my data) is touted as “your friendly AI pair programmer”.

I have been thinking more critically about how to think about programmering. This critical thinking is not my fault. Left to my own devices I would gladly continue programming away without introspection. However, I work with other people, and sometimes they say things like, “How the heck did you get…

After my last crypto-related post, in which I personally offended half of the crypto community (in my defense I only need 30% of the ETH2 network on my side — THAT’S A PROOF OF STAKE JOKE, FOLKS), a few people asked me to explain why I think Proof of Work…

My experience writing a “no knowledge” key/value server. — I told you there was a part two coming — and this is it. Do you even recall how we find ourselves at part deux? Let me quickly remind you: In my desultory shuffle about the MDN pages, I stumbled on this particularly toxic (TOXIC) nugget regarding the WebCrypto API: