Essays

Sat Oct 28 2023

It's been almost a year since ChatGPT changed everything. Since then, the web has been flooded with content written by large language models (LLMs). Social media is drowning in this boring and generic...

Mon Jul 17 2023

What's stopping me from doing all the things I want to? It's not other people, my ability, or even time. It's my ego, and it's the same for you.

Fri Jul 14 2023

We've all been in situations where our surroundings are too chaotic or noisy to get work done. It's why people go to libraries or coffee shops to work but not tennis matches or concerts. You already k...

Wed Jul 05 2023

There's been an immense shift in awareness and understanding around mental health. We're teaching people to see that one action does not define them. If you screw up today, you're not a bad person; we...

Mon Jul 03 2023

The podcast Hard Fork had a great conversation about how AI will start to consume what it creates. This self-cannibalization will harm future models, and the actions of search engines will only worsen...

Sat Jul 01 2023

I've been taking improv comedy classes for a few months, and I love it. Improv brings with it a bunch of benefits. You learn to think on your feet. You learn to make your partners look good. You add t...

Wed Jun 28 2023

I really struggle to keep in touch with people, especially when they're far away. I don't talk with any of my high school friends, and only one college friend. For the longest time I thought it was so...

Mon Jun 26 2023

Are you stuck trying to choose the perfect tech stack or the best side project to build rather than just getting started? Do you own twenty different courses but can't decide which topic is the best t...

Thu Jun 22 2023

If you read books on an Amazon Kindle, you should know you can access all of your books on the web, too. It keeps in sync with your Kindle device and any Kindle apps you might be using. While it's not...

Wed Jun 21 2023

We all know gossip isn't kind. We get that it hurts the people we're talking about, even if they never find out about it. What you might not realize is how much it hurts you, too. I don't think of mys...

Mon Jun 19 2023

If you're learning to code in 2023, you probably wonder, Should I be using AI tools like ChatGPT and Copilot? I say yes and no. Yes, because clearly, some amount of AI will exist in every developer to...

Mon Jun 19 2023

I'm a perfectionist 😇 You'll often hear this said by someone who seems to have their whole life together. They seem to sit back and calmly put out consistent, excellent work. It's these people that g...

Sun Jun 18 2023

It's a mad dash, but I love my frantic writing sprints. To improve my writing, I've set a weekly goal of shipping five blog posts. To reach that goal, I'm doing 50-minute blog post writing sessions. I...

Fri Jun 16 2023

When's the last time you were actually bored? Do you feel the need to always have music or the TV on in the background? Is it hard to make yourself do boring tasks? In the age of TikTok and YouTube, m...

Thu Jun 15 2023

AI isn't going to put us all out of work. It sure as hell isn't going to end the world. Sure, there's a ton of hype around ChatGPT and Midjourney. But there were also hype bubbles around Crypto, NFTs,...

Wed Jun 14 2023

Warning: This post contains spoilers for the 1999 Bruce Willis film, The Sixth Sense. This is an excellent blog post on working with ADHD by Stack Overflow. Let's talk about it.In particular, I liked ...

Mon Jun 12 2023

It was much worse when I was a kid. The stutter was more intense, and I'd get stuck on words for what felt like an eternity. No kid wants to be 'different,' at least not like that. I don't think I was...

Sat Jun 10 2023

I identify as a multipotentialite, which means I have a lot of interests and creative pursuits. I love teaching, designing, making videos, doing podcasts, writing blog posts and newsletters, building ...

Thu Jun 08 2023

I was catching up with my pal Cassie Evans when we both touched on something we had discovered independently about ourselves. We tend to compare ourselves to others in a particular way. We compare our...

Wed Jun 07 2023

In The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin, she talks about the three types of fun: Challenging fun, Accommodating fun, and Relaxing fun. Challenging fun requires a good amount of effort and some plan...

Tue Jun 06 2023

Over the last few months, I've slowly refined my productivity system to something I'm thrilled with. I've tailored it to me and my needs, but one or two things I'm doing can be helpful to you, too.

Mon Jun 05 2023

Body doubling is the best technique I've found to help me get work done. For me, working alone is challenging and requires a ton of willpower. When body doubling, you work alongside someone else, eith...

Fri Jun 02 2023

Brene Brown has this fantastic concept called Painting Done, which helps you give better directions to others. There are three levels for how much information you provide when you give someone a task:...

Thu Jun 01 2023

There are rare tools that change how I interact with the world or what possibilities I see. One of those tools is Descript. Editing videos and podcasts like they're Word docs was such an innovation th...

Wed May 31 2023

My later years as an elementary school teacher were pretty miserable. The hours were long (7am-6pm most days), the pressure was unrelenting, and the entire system was designed to reduce a child's valu...

Wed Dec 28 2022

This is a brain hack I've been using on myself for the past year. Sometimes the hardest part of a task is _just starting_. If I'm not exactly sure how something needs to be done, I'll most likely proc...

Sat Feb 26 2022

Making plans used to stress me out. I wasn't a calendar person, so when asked if I was doing something next week I honestly didn't know. The problem was I wasn't using my calendar. When you're not ope...

Wed Jun 09 2021

When we lower the bar for what we share with the world we're able to create more and improve faster.