I’ve wanted a 3D printer for years. There is something about the idea of taking an object that exists only in my imagination, designing it on a computer, pressing a button, and watching it become a physical thing that I find absolutely fascinating. It feels like something out of science fiction. The kind of technology I used to imagine having when I was a kid. But for years, two things kept me away: the price and the amount of fiddling involved. ...
I walked past Can’t Hurt Me in stores for years. David Goggins on the cover, staring at me. I never picked it up. I was done with self-help. Done with theories about how to live. Done with monks on mountaintops and founders who wake up at 5am and need you to know about it. Then a few months ago I bought it. I still don’t know why. Something about it got me that time. ...
The Lesson That Used to Be Unavoidable Every senior engineer I respect has a similar war story. They wrote a Python script that was too slow, and someone told them to learn what a list comprehension actually does under the hood. They built a React app that re-rendered itself into a coma, and they had to crawl back into the DOM to figure out why. They shipped a service that fell over the first time real traffic hit it, and they spent a weekend learning what a connection pool is. ...
The idea of a “second brain” is simple. An external place to put thoughts, notes, ideas, and fragments of work, so your actual brain can focus on thinking and deciding instead of remembering. In theory, this is how knowledge compounds instead of disappearing. I have liked this idea for a long time. It is why I used Microsoft OneNote for years, and later moved to Obsidian. What I never liked was how much work these systems require in order to be useful. ...
A Small Number, a Real Moment CV Match has been out in the world for a few months now. I almost didn’t notice when it crossed 100 installations. That number, by itself, is not impressive. It is small. Almost trivial. What made me stop was not the number, but the realization that this thing actually existed in the hands of people I did not know. Real users, not personas. Real decisions, not demos. ...