On Beginning

There is something both terrifying and freeing about a blank page. I have started countless notebooks, filled a few, abandoned most somewhere in the middle — usually around the point where the initial enthusiasm meets the daily grind of putting words to thoughts that resist easy articulation.

This is not another abandoned notebook. Or at least, that is the intention.

I build things — software, mostly, though occasionally physical objects that require different kinds of patience. I have been a developer for long enough that the craft no longer feels foreign, but not so long that I have forgotten what it felt like when it did. I am interested in the intersection of tools and thought: how the software we build shapes the way we think, and how the way we think shapes the software we build.

This space is for writing that does not fit neatly into a README or a pull request description. Observations from building. Notes from reading. Occasional attempts at thinking through hard problems in public.

The name of the site is simply my name, which feels right. These are not brand communications or careful personal marketing. They are just things I think about, written down.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

I make no promises about frequency or consistency. I do promise that whatever appears here will be something I actually believe, or at least believed at the time of writing.

Welcome to the notebook.