Hoarding Minimalist. Product-minded Software Engineer. Usually confused. on Kevin Quinn

After a long hiatus, I can finally say that my PR to add a long-awaited search bar into the Loop Habits app has been merged1 for the next release!

Til: if you’re willing to sit with discomfort and a bit of anxiety, you can get a 2nd carry-on for free.

TL;DR: July Iceland trip, drove south coast out to Diamond Beach and back while stopping at cool sites along on the way.

Can you let your phone battery drop to 10% without stressing?

You can lead a horse to make an anonymous feedback form, but how do you get the other horses to fill it out?

TIL you can can find useful GreaseMonkey/TamperMonkey scripts to automatically add offers to my credit cards when I log in to Chase or American Express, rather than having to manually do it (which I just end up not doing).

Maybe my reality would be more aligned with my values if I tried to keep alternative metrics in mind, rather than falling back to the easiest existing metrics like money/net worth: Memory Dividends (from the “Die with Zero” author) Total number of people…

“Metrics are useful because they compress information…They are dangerous, because they compress information.” -> source - C.

Recently I was procrastinating and my brain was searching for something to latch onto.

Wealth in the modern era seems to be the privilege of disconnecting without consequence.

is it cool AI lets you build completely bespoke tools quickly?

TL;DR: what if PR review was as engaging & low-friction as TikTok?

My current approach to Agent Skills is to not include them unless I feel the pain without them.

Can we make agents more reliable with better deterministic tooling?

I look forward to when tooling around AI agents has standardized to solve the common frustrations.

I started playing with Claude Code a month ago, and to my horror I think I’ve been raw-dogging the experience with no protections.

There’s this trend of Rust rewrites of tools that either make common tasks super fast or simplifed, and then they get significant adoption.

I am the bottleneck with AI development.

Over time I’ve tried many different styles of to-do systems and apps, most of which have ended in the slow realization that I was stressed & the my version of the system was a flaming pile of crap (exhibit A: the “mountain of post-its” system ).

I’m starting a new project, and I’m struggling with how much of it I should be writing by hand.

For a while I’ve been experiencing extreme slowness doing regular web browsing on my laptop, and it’s been frustrating the heck out of me.

A creation so unfortunate, it has never been seen on the internet before.

There’s a Midwest Archetype of couple I see in the Chicago/Milwaukee/Madison area, though it likely could be drawn to cover a much wider swathe: Met each other at a state school Married in their mid to late 20s Both have “email jobs”; e.g. they sit and wo…

Living next to your friends is awesome.

As someone who struggles to remember anything, I don’t have the luxury of trusting my brain to keep track of it.

Now that LLMs have gotten relatively consistent at producing quality code in one shot (depending on the size & type of problem), I’m having to retrain my brain to realize that I should: Be making many more throwaway one-off tools I should care about the UX

I recently heard a podcast discussion about a man who uses AI tools to summarize 36 podcasts at a time, extract key insights, and then kickstart blog posts for him which are trained on his existing blog style.

So you’ve been hearing a lot of hype around Claude Code, Windsurf, etc about how it’s magic that can do your entire job in mere minutes - yet when you try integrating AI into your workflows, it just feels like super-fancy auto-complete?

With modern tools, I could live my whole life in my apartment and not have to interact with any humans.

I saw an anecdotal study online recently which boiled down to “I lied to my hygienist about my flossing, and they couldn’t tell I was lying”.

The trope of the 10x Developer has been written about ad nauseum, but there’s another type you are more likely to meet in your career - the 0x Developer.

General Links Github - see footer LinkedIn - see footer 💳 Credit Card & other referrals If they don’t work, it’s possible it’s been too long since I swapped them out - hmu if so. last updated: March 22, 2025 Chase Chase Ink Business - Unlimited, Cash, Pre…

I began my career carrying a quiet conviction: I cared about the craft of coding in a way corporate drones didn’t.

I’m no expert on charisma, so I can’t teach you to be the next suave slick scooter, but I can at least showcase a few pitfalls I’ve watched people barrel-roll into when spending time with me.

I want to have a concrete piece of writing I can look back on that details the business values that resonate with me, and that I would be proud to have my name attached to an organization that follows them.

At my day job, I work on a team that builds internal software products for a (somewhat) captive audience1.

A few languages that I’ve stumbled on recently that I find very interesting - they aren’t general purpose like Python - they do what it says on the tin, and do it well.

There I was, vomiting for the 10th time into not just one, but two different sinks, all while managing to avoid the obvious target of the toilet.

You’ve probably seen the ads from Youtubers, podcasts, and more for data removal services - they’ve been marketing heavily lately, at least in my neck of the internet.

As a city dweller, you must quickly learn the invaluable skill of dodging dog poop on the sidewalk.

Don’t be shy, come say hi!

I’m turning off traffic analytics for my personal blog.

A collection of the best newsletters & articles I’ve encountered, so I can 1) easily remember them, and 2) easily share them.

The lack of a system is still a system.

Critical information locked away in institutional knowledge (previously known as “tribal knowledge”) has cropped up in every workplace I’ve ever been a part of, and no one seems to have good solutions for it - whether that’s a team of 2, or a team of 50,0…

I was listening to the interview with Pieter Levels on MFM , and was struck by his approach to avoiding potential frustrations, since they could derail his ability to spend time on what matters.

I saw “The Man in the Arena” - and he wears LED-tipped gloves and a snazzy hooded boxer’s robe.

TL;DR: Slack is shutting down the functionality that powers the open-source app I built for Workflow Builder , their Nocode automation tool.

When developing, I keep running into situations where it turns out better to separate the decision making logic vs the actual actions that arise from it.

Update Mar 2026 I haven’t used Dex in a couple years at this point, although I still have the account.