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Latest — Sep 5, 2025

1997: Steve Jobs’s Miracle Year

This summer, I read Apple in China by Patrick McGee, which Stratechery called “one of the best books about Apple ever written”. It prompted me to look in more detail at Steve Jobs’s return to Apple in 1997. I had assumed that Steve Jobs's return to Apple

More issues

How I got an O-1 visa as a software engineer / founder

I am a software engineer turned founder / CTO. My O-1A petition was approved in ~1 week with premium processing, and was sponsored by the company I co-founded. I met 4 of the 8 ‘extraordinary ability’ eligibility criteria required for the O-1.

Timeline of Everything

* 100,000 - 200,000 years ago → Homo Sapiens evolve * 50,000 years ago → Humans acquire language * 10,000 years ago → Agriculture develops * 3300 BCE → Start of the bronze age * 2600 BCE → Great Pyramid at Giza built * 1325 BCE → Death of King Tutankhamun * 1200 BCE → End of bronze age / start

Dealing with period of low focus / energy

Like, I assume, everyone else, I have days when I am more focused and motivated and other days when I am less so. What I have found helpful on the low-focus days is to work through the list of questions below. If a question triggers a response beyond a neutral

Things that would be cool to work on

A Crowdsourced Religious/Spiritual Text | A Programming Language for Argumentation | Showing Historical Timelines Side-by-Side

The Zen of Android

There are always multiple ways to do the same thing. The thing you want is deprecated. Examples only serve to make the documentation bloated. You will always forget which xml property you need. The inline error will disappear in 30 seconds, or when you rebuild, whichever is later. When in

What is Structured Conversation?

Most conversations are not consciously structured ahead of time. Rather, the shape they take emerges organically through the people who are present. A few recent experiences have led me to believe that while there is nothing wrong with these kinds of organic, unstructured conversations, there are lots of incredibly effective

My week at the Insight Meditation Society

Over the new year, I spent 9 days on a meditation retreat at the Insight Meditation Center in Barre, Massachusetts at a course run by the folks at the Insight Meditation Society (IMS).

Books I enjoyed this year

Winners Take All Anand Giridharadas I first came across Anand Giridharadas in an "Authors at Google" talk on YouTube which was part of his book tour for this book. I remember that he was pulling no punches as he critiqued the neoliberal elite in general, and the tech

My vim Based To-Do System

About a year ago, I came across this blog post by James Routley, where he explains his approach to keeping track of work-related notes. His "logbook" is a collection of Markdown files, stored in a single folder, and named according to the date they were created. This is