Curiosity is desirable and powerful, but when fragmented, it becomes a liability. Every time you mindlessly consume content without context or an objective, you’re building a mental bottleneck. However, you want to make room for serendipity and be able to follow rabbit holes...
I’ve spent hundreds of hours reading books and taking courses, hoping they would help me grow. But most of the time, I finish and can’t remember a single thing that matters. There are no big ideas, no change, just a hollow, frustrating feeling that I wasted my time. I knew...
The trail was covered in ice. Where people had walked, the snow was compacted and slick, and I was heading downhill over a lot of rocks. It’s easier to be present when you’re just trying not to slip and crack your head open. This weekend, I conducted an experiment. I headed to...
I’m overwhelmed, tired, and not getting anything done. I know I want to focus on foundational skills and habits to help improve my day-to-day, but there are so many different things I could work on. Do I improve my software development skills? If I need to switch jobs, I should...
In September, I stepped on the scale, and I felt like I would puke. I clocked in at 307.1 lbs, an all-time high. All year, I had been hovering around 300, which was frustrating because I was trying to lose weight. In May, I walked 6,500 steps every day, and in August, I had a...
I've taken on the challenge of resurrecting a website that's been offline for more than a decade. It had a very expansive and well-normalized database using MySQL. I've been out of the SQL game for about six years, as all my recent projects have used MongoDB. It's been fun...
Today is the 30th anniversary of Dave Winer's blog, Scripting News. I've followed Dave's writing and podcasting for my entire career and have had the privilege of many conversations with him over the years. We may not see eye to eye on everything, but most of the time I do...
I've been programming in one form or another for as long as I can remember. Since my family got its first computer when I was five, I couldn't have programmed much before that. However, I knew DOS well enough to help teachers with their computers in first and second grade, so I...
In 2018, I built a time-tracking demo in React for a job I was applying for. I had spent the years prior working with Angular (via Ionic), but many of the jobs I'd seen asked for React. Since then, it's been dormant while I moved on to other things. I still only do a...
Have you ever felt like no matter what you do, the scale just won’t budge? This might be because you're focusing on the wrong type of metric. I've previously written about the differences between lead and lag metrics and why it's important to differentiate between them when...