About

Married to Carissa Byers. Father of Margot, Lucy, Milo and stepdad of Penn. Educator. Writer of songs and stories. Cyclist. Indieweb advocate.

You can get in contact with me here.

See also: colophon, uses, and now.

The blog started in 2001 and now has over 3,000 posts. Posts are single links/thoughts, collections of links, journals, or longer posts about philosophy, bicycling, music, or the internet. It started as a notebook, became a micro-blog, then a proper blog (long after blogging had peaked). I like to think of it as a public commonplace book, although that feels aspirational. There is ample cringe and broken links in the old stuff, which I am slowly editing over the course of years.

If you are looking for somewhere to start, try these:

On building software

• ProductCamp 2024 (2024)
• The Defining Trait of a Senior Software Engineer (2022)
• Henry Gantt (2022)
• Just Start Any Way You Want to (2021)
• In Defense of the Backlog (2021)
• The Goldilocks Principle of Startup Engineering (2020)
• Time to Think (2020)
• ProductCamp (2018)
• The Three Paths (2017)
• On Humility in Product Development (2016)
• Life Is Too Short to Make Shitty Software (2011)

On AI

• The Tyranny of AI Is Not AI Itself, It Is the Lazy, Rushed Product Designers with No Imagination or Sense of Craft (2025)
• Overview of the GenAI Landscape (2025)
• General-audience AI Presentation (2025)
• Comments on How Software Engineers Actually Use AI (2025)
• My Mostly Positive Experience with GitHub Copilot (2024)
• You Might Think Using AI in Your Business Will Save You Time and Development Cost but You’d Probably Be Wrong (2024)

On the Internet and culture

• Culture Is What We Collectively Agree upon (2025)
• Spells and Prayers of Distributed Localism (2025)
• The Utility Is a Bug Not a Feature (2025)
• We Should All Treasure Our Own Tiny Corners (2025)
• The Ghost of Somebody’s KPIs Are Rattling Their Chains in My Forest (2024)
• A Quiet Home (2024)
• To Find an Alternative to Wordpress, Just Go Back to the Beginning (2024)
• Desperation Algorithms (2024)
• Internet Homesteading Renaissance? (2020)
• Rebels: Episode 1 and Episode 2 (2016)
• Thanks for Ruining the Internet (2014)

On software education

• Minecraft U Special Projects Camp (2023)
• Computer Programming Adventures (2021)
• What Is Minecraft U? (2017)

On music and art

• Helen Thorington (2024)
• The Music That Made Me (2021)
• When I Blog About Hip Hop (2016)
• Art Redux Notes (2008)

Milestones

• The Sale (2020)
• Milo (2014)
• Form (2014)
• Lucy Pearl (2011)
• Goodbye Integration Research dot org (written in 2016 about events of 2004-2005)

Or you can start at my latest post: Why Are We Seeing Different Findings About AI?