Blog

Why This Stack? Before diving into the how, let’s address the why. There are countless ways to publish online—Medium, Substack, WordPress, Ghost, Notion. Why choose this particular combination of tools? Obsidian gives you the best writing experience. It’s local-first, Markdown-native, blazingly fast, and your content lives as plain files you actually own. No vendor lock-in. No subscription required for basic use. Your thoughts remain yours. Hugo is the fastest static site generator. Written in Go, it builds thousands of pages in seconds. No JavaScript runtime, no complex build pipelines—just raw speed. The result is pure HTML/CSS that loads instantly. ...

There’s a technique so powerful it feels like cheating. It requires no apps, no subscriptions, no complex systems. It’s been available since humans invented writing, and yet we constantly forget to use it. Write things down. That’s it. That’s the whole technique. Why Your Brain is a Terrible Storage Device Your working memory can hold roughly 7±2 items. That’s it. Seven things, give or take. Meanwhile, you’re trying to: Remember that bug you need to fix Keep track of your meeting at 3 PM Hold onto that brilliant idea you had in the shower Recall what you were supposed to buy at the grocery store Not forget your partner’s birthday (it’s this week, isn’t it?) Your brain is not a hard drive. It’s more like RAM that’s constantly being garbage collected by an overeager process that seems to prefer deleting important things. ...

In 2017, a paper titled “Attention Is All You Need” revolutionized machine learning. The Transformer architecture it introduced now powers everything from GPT to BERT to the AI assistants we talk to daily. But beyond its technical brilliance, the attention mechanism offers a surprisingly profound insight about how intelligence might work. The Core Idea Traditional neural networks processed sequences step by step, maintaining a hidden state that theoretically encoded everything that came before. The problem? Information had to survive a long game of telephone. ...

I’ve been thinking about what Friedrich Nietzsche would make of modern software development practices. The more I think about it, the more convinced I become: he would have despised Agile. Let me explain. The Eternal Recurrence of the Sprint Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence asks: would you live your life exactly the same way, infinite times over? It’s a test of affirmation — do you love your life enough to embrace its infinite repetition? ...

Code review is ostensibly a technical practice. We review code to catch bugs, ensure quality, share knowledge. But after years of reviewing (and being reviewed), I’ve come to believe something different: Code review is primarily a psychological exercise. The code is just the medium. The real work is navigating human emotions, social dynamics, and cognitive biases. Why Criticism Hurts (Even When It Shouldn’t) When someone critiques your code, your brain doesn’t distinguish it from personal criticism. Neurologically, social rejection activates the same brain regions as physical pain. ...