Home¶
Welcome to my personal website. This is mostly a place to put my blog posts, with a few other things thrown in when I get excited about them.
Blog Entries¶
Here are my 10 latest posts:
A NY Times piece on Mt Bachelor - Jan 24, 2025
Our not-so-little local mountain got a write up in the NY Times, which is always fun to see. It’s about a local effort to try and buy the mountain (~$200M, so some very rich locals..). Lots of funny little nods to the culture of Bend:
Noah Smith on the LA fires - Jan 23, 2025
In general, the misinformation, finger-pointing, and political opportunism flew fast and furious. But if you remained calm, resisted the urge to dunk on your political enemies, and watched the situation unfold, I think there were a few important signals you could extract from the storm of information. Basically, the lessons I take away from the horrific L.A. fires are:
Wool & Sand are solid books - Jan 22, 2025
We watched the Silo series on Apple TV, and it was pretty solid. I’ve gotten into the habit of trying to read books after they make shows about them, and the books tend to be better than the shows :) In this case, I enjoyed both.
Stack Overflow’s decline - Jan 21, 2025
The volume of questions asked on StackOverflow started to fall quickly after ChatGPT was released in November 2022, and the drop continues into 2025 at alarming speed. Fresh data shows how bad things are, courtesy of software engineer, Theodore R. Smith, a top 1% StackOverflow contributor. He shared the number of questions posted by users in this Gist dump:
International travel and community - Jan 20, 2025
My wife and I took off from Portland in February 2018, and ended up working and traveling for ~2 years after that. Luckily in January 2020, we ended up settling down in Bend, at the planned end of our travels. We’ve been here for 5 years now, and we’re about ready to take off again!
Foreign Policy Live: Fareed Zakaria’s ‘Age of Revolutions’ - Jan 19, 2025
I really enjoyed this episode of Foreign Policy Live with Fareed Zakaria where he discusses his book Age of Revolutions.
Alternative company structures - Jan 18, 2025
I ran into this Ask HN post from Dave Snider, which asks about alternative company structures:
Understanding maps - Jan 17, 2025
I’ve always enjoyed maps, and they still kind of blow my mind when I really think about it. Especially with hiking and international travel, the sense of space in a place is always something I have a hard time intuiting, and maps are a starting point to understanding, as well as geopolitics :)
Travel bag research - Jan 16, 2025
I’ve been looking into good bags to use for hiking and work travel, as I often want to combine a work trip and a hiking trip. The onebag reddit is kind of overwhelming, but a reasonable place to start research on this.
The Camino de Costa Rica - Jan 15, 2025
I’m hoping to do more hiking this upcoming year. Last summer my wife and I did the Tahoe Rim Trail, which was a great hike within driving distance. With a goal to do more international travel, we’re looking at doing the Camino de Costa Rica later this year. It sounds like there are a number of options for places to stay along the route, so camping is somewhat optional, and lots of local food options.
