Programming insights to Storytelling, it's all here.
There's a strange contradiction happening in tech right now. Companies are forcing employees to integrate AI into their workflows, celebrating productivity gains and AI-assisted everything. Yet when job candidates use AI during interviews, they're treated like they've committed career suicide.
From time to time, I'll hop on someone else's computer to browse the web and I feel an intense revulsion. Every page you visit is littered with ads. The top has ads, both left and right sidebars have ads, there are ads between paragraphs, there are ads at the bottom. And if you mentally ignore them, clicking at random places on the page will trigger a popup. How can you even read anything with all these distractions trying to grab your attention?
There was a question on Hacker News where a user asked how he could ensure his writing would endure for a hundred years. At first, I treated it as a technology problem. Storage, formats, domains, backups. If the goal is durability, then the best technology we've invented so far is still paper. Print it. Put it on a shelf. Problem solved.
There was a time when building a good UI was really hard. My default Microsoft Word window had at least five toolbars. My web browser opened to Yahoo, where finding anything felt impossible. Internet Explorer sprouted toolbars I never remembered installing. We crammed features into every nook and cranny of the screen.
My mother handed me her phone a couple days ago. "Do you think this is true?" she asked, her finger hovering over a video about new curfew laws coming to California, featuring Denzel Washington's take on the matter. I'm so proud that she's learned to ask this question now instead of immediately sharing. But as she waited for my response, I noticed she had already watched the entire video.
OK, that may be a little mean-spirited, but I don't just mean you. I mean a whole lot of us. A couple weeks ago, a graph made the rounds showing the decline of Stack Overflow. At its peak, there were 207,000 questions asked in a single month. By December 2025, there were just 3,600. That's a steep drop.
I hear this all the time. If your employer isn't treating you right, just get a better job. If your manager is overworking you, just find one who won't. If your company has a chaotic codebase, just move to a sane one. In fact, if a stock in your portfolio is underperforming, just pick a better one. It's that easy... Except it isn't.
That first Monday of my holiday break, I made a promise to myself. No work emails, no side projects, not even glancing at my blog. This time was for family, for Netflix queues, for rereading dog-eared novels. One thing I was really looking forward to was learning something new, a new skill. Not for utility, but purely for curiosity. I wanted to learn about batteries. They power our world, yet they're a complete mystery to me. I only vaguely remember what I learned in high school decades ago. This would be the perfect subject for me.
Whenever I hear someone express a thought really well, like they make a sharp observation, tell a funny story, or just have a moment of clarity, I ask the same question: "Why don't you have a blog?" Their answer is almost always a variation of, "I don't know what to write about."
How fast is a horse? I was kinda baffled when I got the answer. For the average horse, one grazing in nature or on a ranch, they can go between 20 to 30 miles per hour. Doesn't that feel slow? What about race horses? I don't have a horse to clock it myself, so I'm relying on petmd.com. The website tells me that the English Thoroughbred can run for up to 44 miles per hour. It's fast alright. But I was going just as fast on my short commute to the office, and it didn't feel like I was racing at all.
