Links

Tools I built, plus papers, talks, and blogs I keep coming back to.

16 dated finish lines. The step is flat for years, then this week.

29 Aug 2026 #post — There's no speed limit — Derek Sivers. Five lessons, two years of theory. The standard pace is for chumps.
23 Aug 2026 #post — How to spot a rocketship startup in AI — Janvi Kalra. Hypergrowth is revenue and the slope, not the valuation. If they will not share the number after an offer, walk.
19 Aug 2026 #talk — How We Build Effective Agents — Barry Zhang. An agent is a model using tools in a loop. The object is the trajectory.
18 Aug 2026 #post — Agents
17 Aug 2026 #talk — Why people think agent is a buzzword but it isn't
16 Aug 2026 #talk — Building more effective AI agents
14 Aug 2026 #podcast — Scaling Uber with Thuan Pham (Uber's first CTO)
26 Sep 2025 #podcast — Richard Sutton — Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end
18 Aug 2024 #paper — The Calculus of Service Availability
16 Sep 2021 #post — My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file
31 Aug 2021 #post — Do I Need to Go to University? — Chris Olah. Instead of asking if university is good, ask whether you have something more compelling to do.
18 Jun 2021 #talk — Why learn Rust when there are no jobs in it?
21 Aug 2019 #talk — What the heck is event loop anyway?
3 Sep 2018 #post — 12 factor app
1 Apr 2018 #paper — MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters
1 Apr 2018 #paper — The Google File System

Tools I’ve built

Snap — macOS screenshot tool. Hotkey, drag a region, annotate, image is already on the clipboard. Built to stay small after Flameshot ballooned.
Blazer — concurrent file downloader in Go. Range requests, resume, SHA256. Stdlib only.