I write essays. I build software and games. I keep bees and skate ramps. These things are more connected than they look.
The essays make a case for taking the harder path — in craft, in work, in the things worth not handing off — when the harder path is the one worth taking. The current arc looks at taste, judgment, and craft in the AI era, because that’s the hard road in front of me now, but the subject is older than AI and will outlast it. The catalog has forty-seven technical books across two decades, plus a few trade articles, courses, and the foreign translations that push the total edition count past eighty. The vault is where the older material lives — including, it turns out, the origin document for everything I’m working on now.
Recent essays
Standing on Surfaces That Move
June 8, 2026
AI moved the locus of value in software from writing code to deciding what's worth writing. The same move, lagging by a few years, is arriving in the creative arts. And software, a field where the surface has always moved, may have something useful to say about how to meet it.
The Self-Riding Bicycle
June 5, 2026
A joke about a product that frees you from the one thing you actually wanted to do. The line between a tool that assists living and a tool that replaces it — and why convenience has a default direction worth watching.
Becoming Gnarly
June 2, 2026
The through-line under everything else here — the essays, the software, the games, the bees, the skate ramps. A case for choosing the harder path when the harder path is the one worth taking, and the harder skill of telling which paths those are.