I am a software engineer by trade, available for freelance and consulting. These are my writings; mostly non-professional. You can also find me on Bluesky and Github.
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Waiting For The Next Big Thing
September 14, 2025
I’m currently unemployed. I’m not lazy; I’m waiting for the next big thing.
In the summer of 1998, I got an opportunity to talk with Jobs again. I said, “Steve, this turnaround at Apple has been impressive. But everything we know about the PC business says that Apple cannot really push beyond a small niche position. The network effects are just too strong to upset the Wintel standard. So what are you trying to do in the longer term? What is the strategy?” He did not attack my argument. He didn’t agree with it, either. He just smiled and said, “I am going to wait for the next big thing.”
― Richard P. Rumelt, Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters
This famous passage about Steve Jobs describes how he managed Apple. I think one’s career can be approached this way too, and I intend to try it for myself. The next big thing is not always obvious. I expect the best thing to do in this case is bide one’s time, enjoy the moment, read widely and stay curious. Let the next big thing reveal itself in due time.
A research paper from 1981, “Time resources and laziness in animals”, found that many animals spend a lot of their time doing nothing at all. We might have something to learn from our animal cousins. Inaction makes people uncomfortable, especially Westerners who are used to energetically attacking work. But not all work is worthy of one’s time; sometimes our time is better spent walking, reading, conversing, meditating, and exploring.
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Sourdough Bread Notes
September 5, 2025
I've been making sourdough bread regularly since 2022. I learned from the book Tartine Bread by Chad Robertson. Over the last few years, I've learned some things about bread making. I compiled some notes for a friend to serve as a companion to the “Basic Country Loaf” recipe from Tartine bread. I thought I'd publish them here as well.
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A loaf of sourdough I recently baked
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Is the AI Bubble About to Burst?
August 10, 2025
I have been meaning to write a follow-up to my post about AGI with a second part. My intention was to document some examples of prominent people saying or strongly implying that AGI is imminent, to convince myself and my imagined readers that this view is pervasive. For example, here is AI researcher Geoffrey Hinton, often called the "Godfather of AI", speculating about AGI while veiling this as disinterested scientific analysis. Here is the co-founder of Anthropic speaking matter-of-factly about creating human-level AI. However, I've also started to wonder if we've hit peak AI hype, and I am going to write about that instead.
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Adding Comments To This Blog With Bluesky
August 8, 2025
I came across this blog post on Hackernews the other day and wanted to do something similar for my own blog. My reasons for doing this are similar to those outlined in the original post:
- Comments are nice to have. This site doesn’t exactly have huge readership, but I like the idea that someone could leave a comment here if they wanted to.
- That said, it is not worthwhile for me to implement my own comment solution.
- Many people have Bluesky accounts already. It is convenient to not have to make a new account to comment on my website.
- Outsourcing the data hosting, account management, etc. to Bluesky is very nice.
Natalie used React to create the blog post UI, and her blog is powered by Astro. Getting this working in Jekyll with pure Javascript was pretty simple (<100 lines of code, mostly written by ChatGPT). I’m not bothering with image support, linking back to Bluesky (except at the top) or any of the other fancier stuff that natalie b. did for now. I may improve on this eventually, but I’m happy to support text responses only for now.
The only friction with this solution is that I have to go back and edit my post’s front matter with the CID after creating the blog post and linking to it from Bluesky, but this isn’t too much hassle.
You can see the code used to fetch and render Bluesky comments on this site’s github repo.
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A Year of Working Contract
August 1, 2025
For the past year and a bit I've been working on a contract for a large Canadian Insurance company. I got the opportunity through a friend who runs a contracting firm. The experience of working for this large insurance company was interesting. This post is an account, mostly for my own memory and interest, of the work I did there.
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