I'm a software product manager, based in Southern California. I still have a personal website because it's a lot of fun to customize your own little space on the Internet. I write for an audience of one — everything from speed-listening to Amazon's problems, even injecting a little serendipity into your web browsing.

Writing

• 2026 Beyond Vibe Coding: Agent Onboarding and Orchestration 2 min
• Self-publishing is Easy with Claude Code 1 min
• 2025 Clarity Over Completeness 2 min
• Vibe Hosting 2 min
• 2023 Defaults Matter 1 min
• The Courage to Explore, the Commitment to Stay 2 min
• 2022 Shutting Down Side Projects 3 min
• 2021 Bystander Businesses 2 min
• 2020 Amazon's Marketplace Problem 5 min
• Battles of Inches or Miles 1 min
• The Curse of Excess Information 3 min
• Five Rules to Read More Books 6 min
• The First Ten-Thousand 3 min
• Writing Memos 5 min
• This Is Water 5 min
• Lessons From Range 4 min
• Is An MBA Worth It? 7 min
• Read to Write, Write to Learn 5 min
• 2018 Reflections on Reading in 2018 3 min
• Square Cash vs. Venmo 1 min
• 2017 My Best Reading Year Ever 5 min
• 2016 Rethinking The Personal Narrative 4 min
• Can we speed-listen and still understand? 5 min
• 2015 Thoughts on China and 15 things I learned in Shenzhen 5 min
• 2014 Reddit's tax on Amazon purchases 2 min
• Why Messages in iOS 8 will make driving safer 1 min
• CA Lottery: Play Responsibly 30 sec
• For Your Security 1 min
• 2013 Google+ vanity URLs make me like Google+ less 1 min
• Pay with Amazon in the Wild: The Clymb 3 min
• The pain of two clicks 2 min
• How LinkedIn penalizes its users 1 min
• Why Amazon Fresh is about more than groceries 3 min
• A quick redesign thanks to Twitter Bootstrap 1 min
• 2012 Direct Mail Optimization: ING DIRECT 30 sec
• Craigslist testing mobile and tablet versions 1 min
• How many emails do you send a day? 2 min
• 2011 How to have personality: Lessons from Trader Joe’s 1.4 million price tags 3 min
• AvantLink Stats Chrome Extension 2 min
• San Francisco's Tsunami Risks: The Facts 6 min
• Setting up an Amazon EC2 instance: A beginner's guide 3 min
• URL Structure for Usability and SEO 4 min
• 2010 How to form a California LLC by yourself (Part 2) 3 min
• How to form a California LLC by yourself (Part 1) 6 min

Projects

• GearScan Aggregator of outdoor gear deals. Over 34M page views to date.
• WikiRoulette View a random Wikipedia page in every new browser tab.
• Top App Mail A daily email of trending iOS apps.
• KivaLive.com A realtime tracker for microfinance loans made on Kiva.
• yt-cast Automatically upload YouTube audio to your personal Overcast account.