My Operation Principles
My operating principles: be serious but not too serious, be curious and build a shared mind, be radically transparent, move fast and break things.
Archive
All posts, including hidden.
How WhatsApp Works
How WhatsApp actually worked: Erlang/BEAM/OTP all the way down, the biggest machines money could buy, location-transparent actors, and code hotloading as deployment. They bucked every Cloud Computing canon and ran the world's largest messaging system with a tiny team.
Designing a Fairer Electoral System
California's non-partisan commission produced a worse minority seat-to-vote ratio than Texas's partisan one in 2024. The deeper culprit isn't gerrymandering — it's winner-takes-all single-seat districts. Multi-seat districts with ranked-choice voting would do real work here.
A Glass Half Full
A short verse on the choice between half-full and half-empty — I think it is a very important choice. It is a fundamental choice. It affects you more in your life, Much more than in your work.
Joining NexHealth: A New Chapter in My Career
Joining NexHealth as Director of Engineering. Software and AI are eating the world — it's time they ate healthcare too. The mission: build the infrastructure layer that lets EHRs, doctors, developers, and patients actually exchange data.
Claude Code: Take 2
After more time pair-coding with Claude Code, the awe wears off. It's an overly eager junior with raw smarts and no taste — fast, useful for onboarding, but prone to ridiculous code that you'd reject from a new grad.
Conversation around concurrent programming models
A Parley transcript on Python's asyncio, Trio, and structured concurrency. The arc is almost comical: callbacks to promises to async/await to TaskGroups — we hid the tree structure of concurrency, then had to put it back. We should have stuck with future monads.
Birthright Citizenship
From English jus soli through Dred Scott to Wong Kim Ark, gathering the historical context around Trump's executive order. The merits are less clear-cut than contemporary news suggests once you go back to the original sources.
Moving On [Meta]
Leaving Meta after a decade. The Facebook of the Red Culture Book — "What would you do if you were not afraid?" — is not the Meta of muscular energy and top-down NFT, Messaging Interop, and Metaverse. A goodbye, and a question worth carrying into the next chapter.
In Love of Desert
Spring in Phoenix, the Palo Verde trees in bloom, and the Leica Q2 finally clicking — small package, fast lens, physical dials that let you pre-set the shot before raising the camera.