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 of my posts.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.