Blogs

When I first read these on Herzog’s 80th birthday, something struck me: these rules could be applied not only to his brand of filmmaking—as instrumental and impactful as it was to my worldview—but also to the endeavor of a startup. A film is a commercial endeavor as much as it is an artistic one. Past a certain point, it takes money to realize a vision, and people who have money generally want a return on their investment. It took me a long time to realize this. A tough realization, but that’s it. That’s how it is. With that in mind, and through my own experience working in startups, I jot down some quick thoughts on how Herzog’s rules could be applied to building companies, while maintaining the same spirit of adventure, of daring, of creation. ...

What Your Commits Know That Your Resume Doesn’t Your resume summarizes three years at a job in a bullet point. Your git history knows the truth: which languages you actually touched, when, and how much of your energy went where. Here’s how I made that visible. The Gap Resumes flatten complexity into narrative. Git history is granular, honest, and almost never examined. Why it matters: you have proof of your work distribution, right there in the log. ...

There are many kinds of technical velocity debt 1. There are those decisions you, as an engineer, make in the moment to finish a piece of work. Given more time, energy, and space to think, those are decisions you would have made differently. There’s the kind of debt that’s unused code—a retired feature, ignored test specs, multiple implementations of the same helper method or component. Then, there’s the kind of debt that we’ll cover here, debt that isn’t even directly yours, but it impacts you every single day: outdated dependencies. ...

Δv Δv, or delta-v, is what keeps orbital engineers up at night. Simply, delta-v is the change in velocity that is necessary for anything to happen in space. One of the great promises of a momentum-exchange tether is that the system can transfer tremendous amounts of delta-v to a payload without paying exponential costs to do so.1 However, we can’t evaluate these claims in a vacuum (ha). To really get a sense of the unreasonable effectiveness of tethers, let’s first look at the rocket equation more deeply. ...

It was 1999. In my memory, I’m in Mr. Wilson’s chemistry class when I hear about the cause of the crash, but I’m not sure about that. What I am sure about, though, is the feeling: overwhelm at the sheer magnitude of the blunder. $327.6 million spacecraft was lost in seconds. Three years of development. Ten months traveling through space. All because two teams used different units. Could Rust have prevented this disaster? ...

Debugging Claude’s MCP Server with Nix When I first started using Claude with my Nix-managed development environment, I ran into an interesting issue. The default examples for starting a local MCP (Model Context Protocol) server with npx were giving me cryptic error messages whenever I tried to restart Claude: Error: spawn ENOENT Investigation My first step was to check the Claude logs at ~/Library/Logs/Claude/mcp*.log using tail. I also used the MCP inspector tool (so snazzy) to verify that my API keys and tools were configured correctly. Running the tools manually with npx in my terminal worked fine, so what was going on? ...

Default On chases doing. Default Off chases resting. Default On is thinking at least one step ahead. Default Off is stuck in reactivity. Default On is present in the task. Default Off is taken away from rest by the task. Default On is pushing, striving, and improving. Default Off is trying to always return to a state of rest. Default On is ready to go to the next task, which is always known. Default Off is striving to take a break from the current task. ...

Jan. 26, Consider Phlebas, Iain M. Banks Feb. 04, Rain Like Hammers, Brandon Graham 🥈 Feb. 23, Solid State, Coulton, Fraction, Monteys Feb. 27, The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t, Julia Galef 🥈 Mar. 24, The Dip, Seth Godin Apr. 20, Leviathan Wakes (The Expanse, book 1), James S. A. Corey 🥈 May 4, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, Paul Mason 🥈 May 17, Light of the World, James Lee Burke 👂 🥈 May 18, Drive, James Sallis 👂 🥈 Jun. 29, America Chavez: Made in the USA, Kalinda Vasquez and Carlos Gomez Aug. 3, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie 🥇 Oct. 18, Venom: Lethal Protector, vol. 1 Nov. 6, Sex Criminals, vol. 6, Fraction and Zdarsky Clearly, not much time carved out for reading in the last year! However, I was proud that I finished Postcapitalism because I had started it in 2019; it was a fixture on my nightstand for years. I was wrong to judge How to Win Friends and Influence People based on the title, but a more descriptive one could have been How to Get Along with People in Business and in Life. Burke continues to make me want to visit Montana with his paintings of sweeping vistas and rich sunsets, but that isn’t the point he’s trying to make when describing vicious acts of violence.

Jan. 15, My Neighbor Totoro Jan. 21, Transporter 2† Jan. 26, The Eternals Jan. 29, Prisoners of the Ghostland Feb. 18, Ron’s Gone Wrong Feb. 26, 300† Feb. 27, Pig Mar. 6, The Batman Mar. 6, The King’s Man Mar. 11, Free Guy Mar. 12, Army of Thieves Mar. 18, Spider-Man: No Way Home Apr. 9, Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard Apr. 15, Surrogates† Apr. 16, Blade† Apr. 19, Tenet† Apr. 23, The Green Knight May 5, 13 Assassins† Jun. 4, Equilibrium† Jun. 11, Eraser† Jun. 14, Ghost in the Shell (2017) Jun. 21, Wrath of Man† Jun. 28, Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness Jul. 1, 47 Ronin Jul. 2, Nobody Jul. 8, Wild Card Jul. 22, Venom: Let There Be Carnage Jul. 27, Deadpool† Jul. 30, Police Story† Aug. 1, The Dark Knight Rises† Aug. 1, Logan† Aug. 3, Troy Aug. 6, Warrior† Aug. 9, The Paper Tigers Aug. 11, Something Ventured Aug. 12, Prey Aug. 26, Lightyear Sept. 4, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once Sept. 8, The Professor: Tai Chi’s Journey to the West Sept. 11, Thor: Love and Thunder Sept. 15, Avengers: Infinity War† Oct. 14, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines† Oct. 15, A Touch of Sin (2013) Oct. 18, Werewolf By Night Oct. 18, Kung-Fu Panda Oct. 30, Black Adam Nov. 21, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever Nov. 23, Black Panther† Dec. 17, Casino Royale† Dec. 23, Quantum of Solace† Dec. 24, Strange Worlds Dec. 25, Jurassic Park† Dec. 25, Death on the Nile Dec. 26, Skyfall† Dec. 29, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery † denotes a re-watch ...

After moving to a new state recently, I’ve started collecting my now thoughts on the go. I limited each category to one tactical task to complete, just one, but found myself overwhelmed by all of the different tasks that still loomed large. Ordered only by happenstance: - Community: Clean up that sidewalk - Vets: GBF monthly donation - Abe: better with people coming over - Oscar: potty training - New babe: infant CPR classes - Long term crazy: skyhook - Work: finishing ACL - Wife: more cooking - Fitness: Simple standard - Nutrition: more protein - Water: 100 oz - House: hang mail basket and then stack washer/dryer and then soil testing - Health: clear up sinus infection then ankle rehab/practice - Rowdy: rain cover This isn’t a small list, and I like to use my now as a way of focusing on just the next step, just on what can be done now, and what must be done now. ...