Category: blog
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Now – Late 2025
After wrapping up the last school year, I officially retired my red pen and stepped away from teaching fourth grade. It was a wild ride that left me with a deep respect for teachers, students, and administrators alike. I’ve always been comfortable finishing one chapter without knowing exactly what comes next, and, as always, the…
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WordPress Automation that Actually Works
The WordPress Deployment Problem Nobody Talks About Here’s what most WordPress agencies won’t tell you: deployment is a nightmare. Sure — WordPress powers ~43% of the web — but behind those millions of sites lies a dirty secret: most teams are still deploying like it’s 2010. FTP uploads, manual database exports/imports, hoping you remembered to update…
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Building a Deal Distribution Automation System: From Manual Chaos to One-Click Campaigns
The Challenge: Investment Deal Distribution at Scale Imagine you’re managing an investment deal that needs to reach hundreds of potential investors. Each investor needs: Researching startups and mapping corresponding markets was traditionally a very manual, time-consuming, and imprecise process, and the same holds for investment deal distribution. The M&A industry is known to be challenging, partially…
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What I Learned Leading a Startup Dev Team
When I joined a small blockchain startup in Reno, Nevada, I didn’t think I’d end up leading the team that built its core web application. I just wanted to build better React apps. Two years later, I’d learned lessons about leadership, communication, and simplicity that reshaped how I think about software development. Building in the…
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Paired Programming with Claude
Part of the “Conversations with AI” series where I share interesting and useful discussions with AI assistants. These conversations are lightly edited for clarity. The Problem Now that I’ve posted to my blog over ten times, I ran into the scaling issue of only seeing the ten most recent posts on my homepage. When requesting…
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What I’m doing now – October 2024
I’m now a fourth-grade teacher in Shanghai, China. This is a significant career shift from software development that I’m glad to be embracing. At the end of 2023, I found myself on the job hunt unexpectedly. Though I wouldn’t have chosen it, it also served as a period of reflection that I welcomed. During this…
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What I’m doing now (posted 2/1/2024)
Still living in Fort Collins and loving it. Winter is always a great season for productivity and I’m programming at least six days a week. Daily programming usually consists of adding features to my new client platform, small enhancements to other parts of this website, or trying some entirely new tech thing to keep life…
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Why I Almost Bought a Gym
Last year I developed one old belief and one new one. The old one is that it is not necessary to be an employee in exchange for a good life. Good lives are lived in abundance all over the world, especially in the United States. Yet, it remains clear that predictable income through gainful employment…
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Opportunity Cost
I took a trip to Boston to see some old friends this past weekend. We had a lovely time, but events at each end of the trip festered in my mind to the point that I found myself lecturing over them in the middle of a long walk. Do you ever wind up talking to…
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Stillness on an Uncomfortable Flight
Ever heard of Frontier Airlines? The low budget commercial flight service is perfect for those of us who want the miracle of flight and almost nothing else. While popular airlines commonly boast their inflight goodies, above average legroom, and top of the line customer service, Frontier found room in the market for a company with…
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My Open-Source Journey Begins
I’ve realized that I’m a very specific type of person. This is the case for all of us, and I believe the process of narrowing down the cohort of people we belong to also assists in determining where we can be most useful. This is a two-way street. If you decide you want to be…
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The Types of Work I Do
I’ve been on a journey to realize my full potential as a young person. I’ve done all the work that you’d think a twenty-something who would make the former statement does. I listen to audio books and tell people I “read”. I pontificate on the meaning of life. I even meditate once a month just…