About

I’m a wannabe philosophy professor turned wannabe tech entrepreneur living in Orlando, FL.

I’ve spent most of my professional career writing android code (written a bit about it too, full list of posts are here), but I’ve also written quite a bit of javascript (node, react native, react, I co-ran react orlando for a couple years) and a little bit of python, go, and ruby.

Now, I’m a data science engineer at Heap. We’re working on a better way of getting insights from analytics.

This blog is mostly made up of thoughts on building stuff (products, startups, code). Here’s a list of stuff I’ve written that people seemed to really like (*’d items got some buzz on hacker news):

Personal/Philosophy

  1. Why I’m Glad my Dream Job Didn’t Work Out
  2. Why Paul Graham is (sort of) Wrong about Philosophy*
  3. From Panic Attacks to Yoga Mats: Startups, Leadership, and my first 1000 minutes Meditating
  4. Maybe we should go easy on Uncle Bob
  5. Cigarettes and Texts: Self-knowledge, Self-control, and Meditation
  6. Lost in Local Optima: How life-benefitting, habit-forming apps wrong users
  7. My Mid-Career Job-Hunt: A Data Point for Job-Seeking Devs*

Product Management/Business

  1. Business and the Cartesian Demon: How not to Study Business
  2. How Startups Can Do Better Cohort Analyses
  3. How The Lean Principle Became Profound
  4. Some problems with the impossibility of achieving OKRs

Postgres

  1. Working Around a Case Where the Postgres Planner is “Not Very Smart”*
  2. How Postgres Audit Tables Saved Us From Taking Down Production*

Programming

  1. The so-called ‘RESTful’ web in 2018 and beyond
  2. How Passion for Programming Can Make us Worse at our Jobs
  3. Maybe We Should Stop Building Inscrutable CLIs*

Android

  1. Against Android Unit Tests
  2. Why Android Unit Testing is So Hard Pt. 1 and [Pt. 2]({{ relref “2015-04-24-why-android-unit-testing-is-so-hard-pt-2.markdown” >}})
  3. Introduction RxJava for Android Pt. 1 and Pt. 2
  4. 6 Things I wish I knew before I wrote my first Android App
  5. An Espresso Test Recorder Deep-dive
  6. Why I Don’t use Robolectric
  7. Why Android Testing is so Hard: Historical Edition
  8. How to Abuse Kotlin Extension Functions
  9. Towards Godless Android Development: How and Why I Kill God Objects