Writing

• How to become a cracked software engineerMethod · June 2026

  Stop looking at LeetCode solutions. The thirty minutes you spend failing a problem teach you more than the answer ever will — and the whole job hunt runs on the same bug.

• How I try on lives: the 30-day methodMethod · June 2026

  Thirty days won't make you good at anything — I've checked. What a month actually buys is a fitting. You step into a possible life, live it on the good days and the bad ones, and find out if it's yours.

• How I made half a million at 24Story · June 2026

  The climb, corrected downward; the $4.5k-a-month cage it paid for; and why I handed the whole thing back at the peak. One story, both halves.

• The Flua Index — a language level you can say out loudA proposal · June 2026

  I understand about 40% of everyday spoken French: one continuous, checkable number instead of an alphabet soup. Here's how it's measured, and why its whole value is that it won't let me flatter myself.

• What learning Japanese in ~20 hours taught meA learning journey · May 2026

  Not fluent — functional. Twenty tracked hours bought me about a thousand of the right words and the door into immersion. Here's the honest mechanism, and what it pointedly did not buy.

• How I accidentally wrote a book at 14Story · May 2026

  I conned my parents into a gaming laptop to "type my novel," gamed for three years, faked just enough progress to keep the lie alive — and the fake progress quietly turned into a real 30,000-word book.

• Learning to sing, from genuinely tone-deafA learning journey · May 2026

  I still can't really sing. But I dragged my ear from tone-deaf to "carries a tune on a good day," and somewhere in there a song stopped being weather and turned into architecture. That part felt like a cheat code for the brain.

• I used my CS degree to debug my weight lossEssay · May 2026

  I'd done everything right for six months and the scale wouldn't move — until I stopped treating it like a willpower problem and started treating it like a bug.

• Why the best schools taught me to forgetEssay · May 2026

  At the best schools in the world I optimized for the grade, and it worked flawlessly. That's the whole problem.

• What actually makes D&D peakOpinion · April 2026

  A hundred-plus hours behind the screen taught me the peak sessions have nothing to do with the dice, the lore, or the funny voices. They come from a handful of rules for building a world that's already moving before anyone rolls initiative.

• The games I love, and whyOpinion · April 2026

  I hoard consumables until they're useless, then win without them. The games I can't stop playing are the ones that won't let me do that.

• Books that rewired how I thinkOpinion · April 2026

  I don't keep a shelf, I keep a syllabus I set myself — and I read to steal one usable idea, not to collect spines. Here are the few that actually changed how I operate, and the idea I took from each.

• How I got promoted two months into my first jobStory · April 2026

  Not by being the best engineer in the room. By owning the one thing everyone else was too excited to touch.

• Why Balatro is a perfect gameOpinion · March 2026

  A roguelike about poker hands closed the seam I hunt for in every game — the gap between playing well and having fun. Here's exactly what it gets right, and the dice game it nerd-sniped me into building.

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