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Like Herman below, I exercise daily. A one-hour brisk walk in the early morning on weekdays before sitting at the desk, and four weekly sessions of bodyweight strength training (known as calisthenics nowadays). If it’s going to be a scorching hot day, I’ll immediately follow the walk with the training, take a shower, have breakfast, and then start work. In the cooler season, I’ll stop working at noon and exercise before lunch instead. During the weekend, I often take long walks, go hiking, and rest. ...

I was hiking the Narrows trail along the Rockcastle river in Kentucky’s Daniel Boone National Forest, slipped off the edge of the trail and broke me ankle. There was no cell phone service so I ended up butt-crawling a ways on the trail (crutches I hacked together made things worse with weak wood out there) until I finally raised a faint signal. Texted 911 (so thankful they have this service for the deaf), helped their volunteer rescue squad locate me by boat on the river below and their wonderful firemen hauled me down the mountain with good cheer. ...

Luci Gutiérrez, from the linked article. Arthur C. Brooks, in his July 2019 Atlantic article Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think, confronts an uncomfortable truth: professional decline begins much earlier than most people expect. The core of Brooks’ argument is based on psychologist Raymond Cattell’s work from the 1940s, which distinguished between fluid and crystallized intelligence. Fluid intelligence—analytical capacity, processing speed, and the ability to solve novel problems—peaks in one’s early thirties and then declines precipitously, which explains why many tech entrepreneurs achieve fame and fortune in their twenties but enter creative decline by age 30. ...

I have had the good fortune of meeting Scott several times at various conferences and the MVP Summits held at Microsoft headquarters in Seattle. Seeing him get emotional in this talk does not surprise me, nor is it unusual for him to criticize the very technology1 that his company promotes. He has always been an entertaining speaker and teacher. As it turns out, the TED format suits him perfectly. Or rather, the way that technology is utilized. ↩︎ ...

In the last year, a mindset shift and approach appeared as a very simple idea: just do one thing, that I want to do today. The one thing can be small or big, easy or labored, fleeting or long. I carve out time to go play drums for two hours, go for a bouldering session, do a shorter 20 minute run, read a page of a book, eat something I’m really excited about, and more. Even on the most difficult day, I can adjust and find the smallest thing that I am excited about and do it. ...

Neuromancer has become more than just an influential novel; it’s now the blueprint for the entire Cyberpunk genre. Even if you’ve never read it, you’ve felt its impact in nearly every major sci-fi film, TV show, anime, and video game of the past 40 years. Gibson didn’t invent cyberpunk, but he defined it. He created the lexicon—cyberspace, matrix, sprawl—that shaped how we imagine our digital future. Reading Neuromancer for the very first time in 2025 ...

Everyone’s either panicking that AI will replace them or assuming they don’t need to learn anything anymore. Both miss the point entirely. AI amplifies what you already know. If you understand distributed systems, you’ll use AI to build better ones. If you don’t, you’ll use AI to create distributed disasters. The difference? When that AI-generated code breaks in production — and it will — you need to know why. When it doesn’t scale — and it won’t — you need to understand the bottlenecks. When it creates race conditions, memory leaks, or architectural nightmares, GitHub Copilot won’t save you. Your fundamentals will. ...

I believe what’s important isn’t the specific technology itself, but rather maintaining curiosity that always looks toward new alternatives and making technical decisions based on your own judgment rather than simply delegating your choices to popular opinion. In Praise of the Contrarian Stack

The biggest news in tech this week (which isn’t over yet) is, without a doubt, that Cloudflare is about to introduce a pay-per-crawl model for AI bots—huge in many ways, as let’s not forget that approximately 20% of internet traffic is routed through Cloudflare. I have many thoughts right now, and it will take some time for them to settle. A good analysis and explanation of why this move is needed and is a good first step can be found in yesterday’s article by Dries Buytaert’s, The Web’s Broken Deal with AI Companies, which I recommend everyone read. ...

Simon Collison in Another Week in Edale perfectly captures why I enjoy hiking in bad weather, something those in my proximity consider borderline reckless: A calm day is always welcome, but there’s a perverse pleasure in struggling against violent gusts, or enjoying the steady rhythmic crackle of rain on a waterproof hood. Sometimes, bad weather can feel like a gift, exactly what’s needed to stir the senses and awaken the brain. ...