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.
Archive
All of my posts.
Reflecting on AI Coding
Five days, ten thousand lines of Lua, no prior experience with the language. Claude Code is not auto-complete — it's a giant pattern-matching machine that needs grounding through tests and architecture. The 25x figure is cheeky, but the shift is real.
Use ChatGPT to Learn and NeoVIM to Take Note
Introducing Parley.nvim: a Neovim plugin that turns chatting with an LLM into a living, editable transcript. Trees of follow-up questions, annotations, and context compaction via assistant-summarized lines — built collaboratively with Claude Code.
Claude Code
First real run with Claude Code: 500 lines of Lua changes from someone who hadn't written a line of it before. Not AGI, not a junior engineer replacement — a powerful, imprecise statistical machine that makes knowledge workers dramatically more effective.
ChatGPT in NeoVIM
The stock ChatGPT app is awful for organizing long research threads. Running gp.nvim in Neovim instead — full transcript, freely editable, customizable syntax highlighting — turns a chat into the building blocks of a real research report.
WhatsApp Culture
Six years inside WhatsApp's improbably quiet Menlo Park building, where the motto was Keep It Simple and the F word was Focus; and where you hot-loaded code straight into production, no code review. It worked.
Astrophotography
Notes from the Death Valley Dark Sky Festival — amino acids in meteorites, planets around every star, and the practical limits of a Leica Q2 capped at 8 seconds of exposure when you really want twenty.
Happiness @ Work
Five aspects worth weighing when picking a career or changing jobs: money, power, domain, people, growth. And one last gut check — are you having fun? If Mondays don't energize you more often than not, you're probably in the wrong place.
Blogging With GitHub Gages, From A Private Repository
How to run a GitHub Pages blog from a private staging repo with a publish.sh script — drafts in private, posts in public, and an identity that's not trivially traceable back to you. A practical walk-through, not a manifesto.
Dot Files and Mac Setup
A new-Mac setup checklist for the terminal-and-Neovim crowd: Ghostty, zsh, Oh My Zsh, yadm for dotfiles, Homebrew bundles, and the AI tools (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI) now sitting alongside the classics.
First Post
A short note on why I'm starting to write things down — partly the urge to document, partly a reaction to the Elon-beast-mode mood of the moment. The rest will follow.