I spent most of yesterday building a pretty simple website called https://prompts.iwonderdesigns.com The idea came from my wife. She and a few photographer friends run a small creative exercise together. Each week, one of them sends out As soon as she explained it, I thought this would be fun to open up to a wider audience. It also felt like a perfect excuse to lean hard on an AI coding tool and see how far I could push it. So I used If you have not heard of it, Factory is a coding focused LL...
Numb Days
A maintenance-mode guide for days when nothing feels worth doing Some days don’t feel bad in a dramatic way. They feel flat. Muted. Empty. You’re not sad enough to cry, not anxious enough to panic — just stuck in this weird space where nothing feels worth doing… and you’re unhappy that you’re not doing anything. This isn’t a motivation problem. It’s a On days like this, trying to “find purpose” usually makes things worse. So instead of chasing meaning, I use something simpler: Maintenance mode....
The Quiet Grief Behind Modern Management
For people who know me, it might be surprising to hear how much I love people 🙂. Especially the folks on the teams I’ve managed over the years. They’re relentlessly talented, curious, funny, stubborn in all the right ways, and full of these rich inner worlds that have nothing to do with their job titles. They’re engineers, yeah - but they’re also cooks, musicians, parents, painters, marathon runners, woodworkers, travelers, and everything in between. I genuinely love hearing their stories. Wher...
Building mPath: A Tool for Managing the Chaos
I’ve been working on a tool meant to help me as an engineering manager, but somewhere along the way I realized it could be helpful to others too. Building it forced me to step back and think about where an engineering manager’s pain points are most pronounced. What I kept coming back to were two things: tracking large-scale initiatives over time, and understanding the health and happiness of the team. They’re connected, but distinct enough to deserve their own focus. I like to organize work into...
Deciding on Technology
Deciding what type of technical solution to use is always shaped by three main constraints: the limits of technology, the capabilities of the team, and the long-term needs of the organization. Each introduces uncertainty, and understanding their role is critical. For most application and web development, technology isn’t the limiting factor. Nearly every problem has multiple viable solutions already available. Real limits usually appear in fields like AI, game development, physical sciences, med...