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Our oldest child started first grade at the local public school earlier this year.

Shameless self-promotion Why isn't your codebase in English?

It's moments like these when I wish I was reading books in a book club or an English class so I would be able to complain about them to other people.

This edition of Good Tokens is best enjoyed while listening to the Phil Collins version of You Can't Hurry Love.

Over the past several months, I've been collaborating with a friend of mine, Dr.

Worth your time Craft is the Antidote to Slop — Will Manidis is in my internet top 5.

I keep this blog mostly for myself, as a way of cultivating a habit of curiosity and creativity.

Worth your time The Mundanity of Excellence.

A biography of William Tecmuseh Sherman.

In case this is the last Good Tokens of the year, have a great holiday season and end of 2025.

In a previous post, I mused: “You’re not avoiding failure, you’re avoidng the feeling of failure.”

Worth your time Over regulation is hamstringing deep tech innovation.

In response to my 2025 Things I learned post, my friend Mark tells me “You should do a meta post on how you come up with this list.”

I borrowed this concept from Tom Whitwell as a way of cultivating a habit of curiosity.

Worth your time The GLP-1 rollout continues.

Worth your time The Palace of Catalan Music The Goon Squad: Many respondents have been regular porn viewers since the fourth grade; few were older than twelve when they picked up the habit.

I’m trying to get better at building in public and at celebrating projects that end up as dead ends.

A very happy 🎃 Halloween 🦇 to you and yours.

I got to join Marc and Ben from the Supra podcast to talk about how AI is changing how software teams operate.

Similar to Shoe Dog — and different in the way that Nike is different from Trader Joe’s.

Worth your time The Alpha Terrace Historic District in Pittsburgh, PA.

A message from my sponsor Person Do Thing is on Amazon.

2025 is the year of slop.

Mike Judge has a great piece poking at the AI hype where he asks essentially, “If these tools are so great, where is the explosion of AI created stuff in the world?”

The Power Broker by Robert Caro deserves its reputation as a masterpiece.

Best enjoyed this week in a sunny corner of a park Worth your time If you’ve ever wanted to buy a life sized dinosaur, now is your chance.

This week’s episode is best paired with a hot cup of coffee and Wild Ways by Josh Ritter playing in the background.

I'm blatantly stealing this from Matt Holden who taught it to me, but I think about it all the time and I want a reference page to be able to point myself and others too.

This is a book with a handful of big ideas: 1.

Shameless self promotion Matt Holden and I are doing a YouTube show about building with AI called --dangerously-skip-permissions.

Worth your time Replacing lawns with wildflowers 💐.

Things I learned A group of kangaroos is called a mob.

I’ve been reading The Social History of the Machine Gun, which tells the story of the introduction and adoption of automatic weaponry to the battlefield.1 I’m not really a gun person, but I found it fascinating because it is a real life story of how a new…

Worth your time The Medium CEO on the turnaround he has led over there.

The first book in ~2.5 years to crack my booklist.

Inspiration That became my yardstick: I’d ask, “Is this dish good enough to come downtown and wait in line for?

This one is long, for which I apologize.

The third day of the Battle of Gettysburg was 162 years ago today.

Summary I finally had the space to really test Claude Code as a part of my development workflow last week.

Who should read this Over the past several years with Macro Oceans, I found myself in a position I never thought I’d be in: using kelp to launch novel ingredients into the beauty industry (see here and here).

Two years ago, I left a career as a Big Tech PM to join a scrappy seaweed start up selling novel ingredients into the beauty industry.

Super easy to read.

Worth your time How to Live on $432 a month in America How to read coffee tasting notes Einstein and relativity.

Worth your time People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies and China’s superstition boom.

New around here In an attempt to make my writing more LLM friendly I’ve added an llms.txt file and a /llms feature where anyone — you included — can copy ~all of my writing for use in your chatbot of choice.

When I read Range in 2019, one of the things that stood out to me was the role that hobbies have in the lives of high performers.

I keep a semi-secret list of great reads that I periodically revisit during a period of change or when the spirit moves me.

Worth your time People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies “Progress is an optional goal.”

Waymo or way less than you’d expect?

Worth your time New York State of Mind Manhattan, 1931.