Bricolage

People are really surprised to learn I make chocolate and ask me why.

My rubrics are on GitHub — try them with your favorite agent.

Napoleon thought he was steering events.

What we call programming today is not the same activity it was two years ago.

The Bitter Lesson Has Limits For seventy years, hand-crafted AI approaches lost to scaling.

Here’s a quick sketch about why I think protocols are so important and why I think protocol design is a practical skill for many of us to learn.

I really enjoy typography — which causes pain when developing for the web.

Johannes invited me on his LocalFirst.fm podcast and we had a great chat talking about all things Sync Engine / LocalFirst.

I’ve been avoiding adding a newsletter to my blog for months now.

In the past week I built and deployed two micro-apps.

Venkatesh Rao has been on a tear recently with some really insightful posts on AI - if you haven’t subscribed to his substack, Ribbonfarm Studio, you should.

My wife and I have been working on a side project for a while — an AI-powered tool that summarizes YouTube videos.

I was thinking last night about the new starter I released — that in the past, I’d do a short Twitter thread dumping out the various observations I made to myself during the project.

Since my last blog post on local-first and CRDTs two months ago, I’ve continued to explore the possibilities around systems that colocate code with subsets of data, interconnected by sync engines.

Turso is a SQLite-in-the-cloud startup with automatic backup and multi-region leader-follower replication across dozens of regions.

A few months ago in June, I attended a local-first meetup in Berlin organized by Johannes Schickling, formerly the founder of Prisma.

I wrote, maintained, and thought a lot about documentation for Gatsby.

My wife and I often talk about the difficulty of making friends as adults.

My wife and I are working on a fun side project to create a micro-business to make and sell homemade ice cream to our neighbors.

Open source is great!

Gatsby gets a lot of PRs.

I last redesigned my blog around three years ago — before I started on the rewrite of Gatsby that became Gatsby v1.

I gave the following at the local LDS church church I attend.

Once upon a time, I thought self-hosting web fonts was intimidating.

After several years of working on a startup, I’ve recently quit.

I’m an administrator for an active Facebook group.

For most of its life, this blog has run on Drupal.

Quick announcement post.

Ran across a lovely quote tonight.

I was explaining to someone in IRC earlier this week about why I was building my own project management software and said it was basically because managing my projects and tasks (or more abstractly, what I pay attention to) is so critical to everything el…

Recently, for fun and learning, I built a group chatroom feature for Drupal 6.x.

I’m starting work soon on building a new open source Getting Things Done web app that I’m tentatively calling SimpleGTD.

The central task of education is to implant a will and a facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people.

The following is a talk I recently gave at the local LDS church I attend.

Since recent changes in my life have forced me to look for new employment, I’ve had to relearn the long-forgotten art of writing a résumé.

This is from a most excellent biography of a most interesting person, John Boyd.

From the most excellent book, ”The Organization Man“: Of all organization men, the true executive is the one who remains most suspicious of The Organization.

As part of my work with my (now defunct) startup Eduglu, I wrote a Drupal module that integrates with the popular analytics service Mixpanel.

I just posted this on the Eduglu community site.

I was recently introduced to a new phrase which I rather like, “existential musing”.

From Richard Hamming’s classic and must-read talk, ”You and Your Research“.

You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.

Most CCK Field modules have a widget where the user adds information upon creating a node which is then saved with the node.

Killer platforms need killer apps.

Time for another Eduglu release!

In an ideal University, as I conceive it, a man should be able to obtain instruction in all forms of knowledge, and discipline in the use of all the methods by which knowledge is obtained.

Today I rolled out the first beta for my Drupal module, OG Mailinglist, which provides native mailinglist functionality to Drupal similar to Mailman or Google Groups.

Later this week, I’ll be presenting on my company Eduglu and product Eduglu at Launchup, a local entrepreneurship event.

There was a nugget of a comment today on the Lean Startup Circle from William Pietri: However, having made the mistake of building too-general tools before, let me offer a bit of advice.

New release of Eduglu I’m pleased to announce the second release of Eduglu!