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Some years ago, I was reading Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species to see what the source itself had to say about evolution. Aside from the topic itself, I found myself growing somewhat envious of Charles’ post-mortem grandeur. It’s easy to give someone so much credit retrospectively, not realizing they were mortals themselves. Darwin recounts how at many times, he grew very, very ill during his research, sometimes bedridden for most of the year. This surely must have been a horrible way to feel and live. But my silly mind found romance in that. “Ah, what a beautiful thing. Perhaps I need…

This may seem obvious for many, but for me, I never could handle the difference between the two. Any and all stress was an immediate existential crisis. What I mean by existential crisis is, you blame the stress on yourself. You think, there’s something wrong with me, and it’s ruining my life. But there’s nothing wrong with you. You’re just legitimately stressed. It’s important to catch exactly when this happens as well. Sometimes, an external event will happen that is beyond my control. For example, back when I was performing a security audit for Standard Notes, the reviewer underwent a…

This is a question of endless struggle. On the one hand, nature obviously produced us, and it becomes troubling to say "that which produced something as intelligent as us is itself not intelligent". On the other hand, chance, probability, randomness, and singularities play a huge part in modern science, and to question that would surely invite ridicule. I had an eight hour round-trip drive this weekend where I got a chance to catch up on some fascinating podcasts. This one in particular was the Joe Rogan podcast with Paul Stamets, which Rogan himself says is his favorite podcast he’s ever…

I’m exhausted. I keep saying, after I fix this one bug, everything will be groovy, and I can relax. But then I find a new issue to get entangled in. “Just this one last feature, and all will be nice and slow again.” But it’s constant pounding. If I'm not fixing bugs caused by previous code, I’m fixing bugs from new code. The problem is that I’m an obsessive. Once I start on something, it becomes the only thing I want to do. And I’ve been addicted to coding lately. A great problem to have right? Well, coding is fun, when it goes your way. But it never does. From your code will arise new…

There is common behavior in the app (and technology) review world that, upon inspection, really does not seem to be logical. I’m sure you’ve probably seen user written reviews that read something like: ☆☆☆☆★ “This app is good, but it doesn’t have this one feature that this other app has. 1 star.” This sort of comparison game is human nature, and while I don’t intend to change the nature of our behavior, I do hope I can make you think twice before posting a review like this in the future. Taken literally, an app developer will presumably have happened upon an idea before development…

As someone living in the bubble that is the United States, it can be hard to think externally. But every so often I am reminded there is a world outside of my own. This sounds like a hugely unnecessary pep talk before I lay down something extremely simple. But one small change can be the difference between your app being used by people around the world, or just strictly by people like you. The distinction between these two worlds is something I endlessly struggle to comprehend; luckily, the folks building the fine web browsers we depend on are doing the hard work for us. I’ve gotten requests…

I’ve spent the last week in a buggish sort of hell trying to track down bewildering software issues that made no sense at all. It was, by all definitions, hell. I hated myself for writing bugs. And I hated software for being so sensitive to my human-ness. After spending several days collecting clues and checking the same code over and over again, I concluded there was nothing visibly wrong, and it was time to exile myself to some remote island. The issue would later be solved, of course. And it was bewildering for good reason: it had something to do with the timing of the new iPhone…

I’ve been waking up at exactly 7:00am ever since Sunday. Before that, I would wake up around 8-8:30am. Of course, 7:00am Sunday, accounting for Daylight Saving Time, is really 8:00am, so “physically”, nothing has changed. However, overnight, your daily routine is pushed back or up by one hour, and we make no big deal of it. Our artificial world clocks are adjusted, but our internal clocks are stuck trying to figure out what the hell just happened. But life goes on. By Monday, we’ve forgotten all about it. I wonder what role DST has in the difficulty of winters. It’s sort of like stumbling…

I'm trying to write every single day. And it's really hard. It's the first thing I do when I wake up every morning. Why? It's good therapy. And it instantly gives meaning to an otherwise blank canvas of a day. But I don't always have things to say. Or worse, I don't always feel like talking. I might learn a life lesson here and there, and be inclined to share it. But every single day? Close to giving up, I visited Seth Godin's blog, and without fail, he writes a new post every single day. It goes back years and years. Not a single day missed. And it's good content, too. Ok Seth Godin. If…

Anyone who builds software knows how hard it is. I'm referring not to the initial building of software—that's the easy part. What's hard is actually keeping software afloat and healthy for long periods of time, while making it work for millions of people with thousands of different environments. I've recently been trying to debug a certain race condition that has been driving me absolutely mad. Doing so has lead me into a mysterious world which I thought I knew like my own name; after all, it made perfect sense while I was building it. In trying to track down this issue, I've encountered…

Humans today are pathetically ephemeral. It’s what defines our existence. Death lingers in the back of our minds like an unpaid bill (a huge scary bill). Tragically, we may be some of the last ephemeral beings the world sees before this problem is solved. Technology and medicine are moving fast. Within decades, or no more than a century, aging will be cured or delayed, or better yet, electron-emitting devices will be manufactured that can create anything. I try telling my friends about my wild theory that sometime in the (near) future, humans will be able to make nightly backups of their 3D…

Bugs simply do not reveal themselves to me when using my own product. They cower in fear, knowing somehow their all-powerful, all-punishing creator is watching, ready to descend upon them in wrath and eliminate their existence. No, my creations hide from me. Instead, they are attracted to my users. Poor, helpless users who do not have the tools to squash these creepy crawlers. Some bugs are bewildering. A user will have found some way to place his app in an impossibly invalid state. My goal is to replicate his world using the clues I am provided. Tragically, the solution always lies not in…

My brain has many bugs and limitations. But by far the most limiting is my inability to comprehend the existence of other people. I mean, I know you’re there. And I know that your world, to you, is as big as mine is to me. But I am completely incapable of ascribing “realness” to your life. I am incapable of fathoming that inside your mind is a universe bigger than my own. Because one universe is large enough. I have an already difficult time fathoming my own existence, to even begin trying to fathom yours. This may all sound like useless metaphysical nonsense, but one of the most important…

I’ll be honest. I hate data. Parsing it, collecting it, strategizing around it—I just want to build things the way I feel like building things. Instinct has gotten me up to here, hasn’t it? And while I haven’t fully made the switch to a hard-core data kind of mindset, I have realized its importance in some areas, especially if you’re a new company. One of the most dangerous things you can do starting out on a new app or product is changing it too much, especially when you’re not sure where your product stands. The most creeping temptation will always be “I should change the homepage.” Or…

It’s fun and pleasurable to make children. In fact, it’s orgasmic. But, there tends to be an upper bound on the number of children a couple could bear. At some point, the couple presumably understands that another mouth siphoning scarce resources would be detrimental to the entire family, and cannot possibly be sustainable. I’m sure you see where I’m headed with this. Building new features is highly fun and entertaining. In fact, you might even call it the orgasm of the technical world. You’ve brought forth new life that had not been present before. With a few lines of code, a few…