Next time you're banging your head against a hard problem that you can't seem to crack, try this: 1. Gather enough context. Make sure you fully understand the shape of the problem. 2. Walk away and stop thinking about the problem. At some point soon, you're likely to have an epiphany about the problem. For me, these often come during a...

The keys to what, you might ask? Happiness, I guess. I spend a lot of time thinking about happiness and the bigger picture of life. Recently, I arrived on this idea: presence & purpose are all I need to be happy. I define presence as the ability to be in a moment, not lost in thought or consumed with concern over previous moments or mo...

We all slip on our goals and intentions from time to time. In the culture I was raised in, failure is seen as a bad thing. A taboo almost. "You failed the test." "You didn't get the job." "You lost the game." It seems like we were trained to interpret these things as a gut-punch. But are they really so bad? Absolutely not. I've heard i...

What is Project One Five? It's basically the idea that you can do awesome stuff in 15 minutes a day, spread over a period of time. Case study: Pie Calendar. Myself & Jonathan Jernigan ideated Pie Calendar in January of this year (2023.) By May, we not only had a free version of the plugin accepted into the WordPress repository and rank...

Working from home can be really challenging. I know people think that remote workers just get to chill in their pajamas all day and eat snacks. It's kind of true. We also have the entirety of our work life entrenched in the very place we're supposed to go to escape all that nonsense. Some of us are lucky enough to have a separate room ...

There is lots of discussion around generative AI art and text. Much of this discussion revolves around the concept that the AI models are rehashing ideas from human artists to make the generated content. The problem with declaring this method of "creation through consumption" as morally dubious? That's exactly how humans create. We obs...

In my life I've found that sometimes I look "through" people instead of "at" them. The irony is, this is most prone to happen with the pillars in your life. Those who are always there, no matter what. The ones who lift you up and hold your hand and provide guidance. We take them for granted because they are a constant. But they are the...

A long time ago I started learning ActionScript and Flash so that I could create interactive websites. After that, I found a no-code game engine called Construct 2. This is actually where much of my foundational programming knowledge came from. Understanding loops and conditions and variables - it all came from a no-code tool that abst...

Anything you wait to do is doomed to fail. "I'll start watching what I eat on Monday." "After the new year, I'm going to spend more time with my kids." If it's not important enough to start now, you're not gonna do it. You're just signaling your intent to get the payoff without any of the effort. You're spilling the beans before the so...

Many of us strive for perfection in life, not realizing that no complex system or experience ever achieves what we perceive as perfection - it's simply not possible. But what we miss is that our lives are made up of many individual moments, and many of those moments in isolation are quite perfect. If you don't consider the moment that ...