Blog

Excitable, by design

The many algorithms that curate my news and entertainment are ever-changing. Rarely, if ever, have they counterbalanced a theme as it held my attention. Instead, content feeds are always amplifying, intensifying, and exaggerating anything that the most recent data suggests I’l...

Do Better

It’s been a decade since my last trip to Japan. Reading through my journal from that time, I find myself again experiencing the same quiet sense of awe. The attention to detail, the discipline, and the deep-rooted respect that permeate nearly every aspect of Japanese life are ...

A Poor Country Is Not a Developing Country

I’m seated in a very hip health food restaurant located in the premier Sea Point neighborhood of Cape Town, South Africa. Outside, the stunning view of the Atlantic Ocean stretches endlessly, and the imposing presence of Table Mountain and Lion’s Head can be felt just a head t...

Winter isn't White

Classifications help us navigate the flood of information every thinking person encounters. Practically speaking, “red” is a color; technically, it’s a range of wavelengths where someone might even mistake violet and orange. Knowing when to say “that’s red” and move on versus ...

Prediction frameworks

For years, I’ve frequently shared an idea about belief and the human experience. It often comes up when discussing the many paths to "truth" that societies have developed. I’ve tentatively called this idea “Prediction Frameworks.” This is the first time I’ve written it down, s...

For Who?

2025 marks my 10-year anniversary of working in tech. In that time, I’ve worn the hats of software engineer, product manager, founder, sales rep, and support person — working alongside an eclectic cast of characters. All of them held different expectations for what makes a gr...

Reinventing the Wheel

People love saying “don’t reinvent the wheel” as if it ends the conversation. It doesn’t. It’s a lazy metaphor that dodges the real question: What do we gain or lose by building something ourselves? Most “wheels” in tech aren’t wheels at all—they’re rented parts with hidden c...

Frantic development

About six months ago, I wrote and deployed ZAR’s first Solana program. It was simple; let users send money to each other without knowing the recipient’s account address, with some discreet logic around transaction sponsorship and a few guardrails. What has been remarkable is n...

The future is improbable

In 2008, financial models predicted a housing market collapse. Traders, trusting these models, began selling their positions. Other traders, seeing the sell-off, followed suit. Within weeks, the prediction had fulfilled itself - not because the models saw the future, but becau...

The adventure of conversation

I have never met a state champion in high-school conversation, nor have I met anyone who has ever “won” a conversation. I have, however, encountered many who mistake the emotional texture of a challenging discussion for the structure of a debate. They feel the sharp edge of di...

Hanging up the abacus

Over the past several months, I’ve developed a number of quiet prejudices about “ways of working” - prejudices I’ve only recently become fully aware of, along with their implications. I’m hardly early to this realization. Years of AI popularization have already produced an ava...

Thinking before doing

Most people don't plan. They just start. "I'll figure it out as I go" is the default mode for nearly everyone, in nearly every field. It feels productive. It feels like progress. But it's usually just motion. I used to work this way. Early in my career as a programmer, I'd d...

Demos, MVPs, and Full-Products: a 2025 revision

*Originally published 2018, revised 2025* Forward: Seven Years Later When I first wrote this piece in 2018, I was frustrated by how loosely the startup world used terms like "MVP." My instinct was that these words had become meaningless through misapplication. However, I had...

A Diamond in the Shit

We have countless conversations in tech around design, user experience, branding, performance, frameworks. We call these things important. They feel important. We build entire careers around them. But they're not. There is only one thing that matters: value. Everything else is...

Great Employees Don't Do What They're Told

In the past year, ownership and autonomy are terms Brandon and I have used a lot at ZAR. For us, their meaning feels implicit - a product of careers spent in entrepreneurial ventures. But I’ve learned that a shared vocabulary doesn’t guarantee a shared understanding. Definitio...

The Generalization Problem

There’s a conversation in AI research about generalization: can large language models truly reason abstractly, or just pattern-match within domains they’ve seen? The discussion usually focuses on architecture, data scale, and benchmarks. I think it misses something more fundam...

When The Moat Drains

For decades, software companies competed by digging moats. Better UX. Wider feature sets. Polished design systems. Each one denominated in time and dollars (i.e., months of labor, millions in spend). However, they were only moats because they were expensive. That's changing f...