Personal records, retrospectives, and portfolios where specific experience comes before the lesson.
9 posts
More than a decade ago I burned out badly, and the obvious story (too many hours) turned out to be wrong. Burnout wasn't the work I did; it was the control I lost over where my time went, and everything the work made impossible outside of it.
Some of my best ideas came from stopping work, not doing more of it. Learning How to Learn's diffuse mode, Kahneman's System 1, and Cal Newport's Slow Productivity all describe the same mechanism: the mind does its best creative work in the background, so past a point more hours make creative output worse, not better.
Swift might be my favorite language, striking a rare balance between low-level and high-level features, yet I've never been able to use it professionally. This is why, and what it takes for a language to break out of its home ecosystem.
A personal retrospective spanning 25 years of operating systems, from Windows 98, 2000, and XP through a decade of macOS to a return to Windows 10 and 11, and a look at where a fully Linux development environment might fit next.
Why effort tracking (where is my time going?) needs to be separate from work tracking (what am I building?) and how centralizing effort in one tool provides visibility that scattered work-tracking systems can't.
Video production work spanning documentary, commercial, and technical content. From humanitarian missions to commercial products.
Software development projects spanning mobile applications, web development, system tools, and emerging technologies.
A 2014 prediction about Apple's newly released Swift language, why it could become the foundation of connected app frameworks, and how apps might eventually run everywhere.
A chronological journey through the evolution of mobile devices from 1999 to 2009. From Nokia brick phones and Sony Ericsson chocolate bars to Palm PDAs, Java games, SMS-based Twitter, and finally the iPhone 3G.