This Is Not a Tree
Language compresses the world into words, and compression is lossy. A small game for noticing what gets thrown away: look at a tree and say, "This is not a tree."
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Long Form
Essays
Thoughts, feelings, perspectives, and ideas on software, AI, and everyday life.
Paying Attention
A week in Vermont with a rented camera taught me to notice again. Then I came home to the dishes and the bills, and had to figure out how to keep noticing in the middle of ordinary life.
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A Crowd of Truths
I spent almost three years building software that reviews novels. Every writer wanted to know if the book was good. Answering honestly meant measuring what we could, judging what we could not, and deciding whose judgment wins when there is no single right answer.
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How do junior engineers build intuition in the age of AI?
I built a tool that "decides the boring stuff." Then I realized the boring stuff was how junior developers used to learn this job, and that fewer of them are getting the chance.
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The Last Framework
When anyone can say "just build me a website," the framework gets chosen by a model trained on yesterday's internet. The risk isn't that React wins. It's that nothing new ever gets the chance to.
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Our Laws Are Old the Day They're Written
Laws get set once and rarely revisited against the harm they were built to address. A $136 ticket at a red light raised a sharper question: what would governance look like if it ran on data instead of inertia?
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