Blog

235 posts from 1996 to present • Page 1 of 10

2026

2025

What Makes a Great Leader

1 min read

A great leader inspires a team with possibility, vision, agency, and genuine caring for their people at every level. They are willing to fearlessly dive into the details and roll up their sleeves alongside their team when needed to get the job done....

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Rust vs Swift 6

3 min read

I re-coded a Rust library in Swift 6 this week and was surprised to see it was a third the size. It ended up with no third party dependencies beyond the system Frameworks, whereas the Rust crate pulled in several third party crates that in turn pulle...

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Introducing Network Weather

2 min read

Folks; thanks for all the kind comments on my transition last week. It's time to start sharing what I'm working on now - fixing employees' remote & hybrid connectivity....

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2024

Commercial Pilot License

2 min read

After seven+ months of work, studying my ass off for my written, and a retest after I went long on my first power-off 180, I've finally achieved a life long goal of becoming a Commercially-rated airplane pilot....

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2023

QR Codes and Trust Chains

2 min read

Trust is an interesting thing. Who do you trust when you scan a QR code on the side of a McDonald's Happy Meal? McDonald's of course, but the list is a lot longer and stranger than that......

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School Board: Masters in Governance

2 min read

About a year ago, I started thinking seriously about running for the school board. As I eased in, it became clear that I had an enormous amount to learn. While I had served on for-profit and non-profit boards for 20 years, being an elected official o...

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Human Adaptability

2 min read

Human adaptability is one of the most remarkable and fascinating attributes of our species. Paradoxically, while we are fantastic at accommodating change, we often resist it. Yet, when we are forced into an adaptation, we end up enjoying aspects of i...

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Infinite Depth Tech Interview Questions

5 min read

The main goals of a technical interview are to assess what the candidate knows, how they explain what they know, and how they reason: how they handle being pushed beyond their limit of firm knowledge and have to rationally speculate. Common failure m...

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2022

Apple Sep 2022 Announcement / Reactions

6 min read

Amazing: Didn’t see the Watch Ultra coming - amazing battery life and durability, astonished that they’ve obsoleted dive computers. Neat improvements to mic and speaker, tho I’m not sure how much the “emergency siren” is gonna help at ~85dB versus, s...

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The Metaverse is a Bad Idea

5 min read

The Metaverse is not a bad idea not because it can’t be built. It’s totally doable, though challenging with dozens of very complex and exciting risks that require solving for: human perception, haptics, foveated rendering, extremely lightweight optic...

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Why We Built Howdy

4 min read

I’m one of the tiny team that built Howdy, a new voice-first chat application that sends speech & an auto-punctuated transcript to close friends and family. We launched our iOS app in Q1 of 2022 and we’re working on the Android app!...

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A "Ring" Theory of Social Media & Closeness

4 min read

I had the pleasure of working at Facebook many years ago. It was a very exciting time, where smart engineers from around the world got a chance to work shoulder-to-shoulder on problems that impacted a large and growing fraction of the human populatio...

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2021

Ten Gig Is Here.

11 min read

Today Sonic.net installed a 10 gigabit synchronous, unmetered XGS-PON fiber optic link to my home in Redwood City California. The connection will cost me $40/month. My only gripe is that I can’t get static IPs, too! I spent the earlier part of the we...

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Thoughts on Life and Education

16 min read

The 20th century model of life can be roughly encapsulated as being in three acts: in the first act, one is educated up to the limit of one’s mental capacity. Then, once full of knowledge, you are sent out into the world to work for as many years as...

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Spring 2021 Apple Announcement Reactions

8 min read

I know the schtick is to “start with the small stuff and then build” but the purple iPhone and reskinning of the Podcast app were pretty underwhelming. There’s so much more Apple could be doing in the podcast production and consumption space. Boo....

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