Food

I go through seasons trying out different foods. That said, the basics are consistent. I’ve been a pescatarian for over twenty years. That’s the right balance for me. I do stints of food journaling. The longest I’ve lasted was logging every that I ate or drank (excluding water and unsweetened tea) for 2.5 years — never missing a day. It never feels like work. I love to gamify these things. I always learn something from those stints. My current exploration is eliminating as much seed oil and ultra processed products from my diet as possible. The downside is that Impossible Meat is now out. Beyond Meat has switched to avocado oil, but I never enjoyed Beyond Meat (except for their hot links). I love the taste of Impossible beef. Regardless, both contain highly processed. So they’re out. It also means many of the convenience snacks at Whole Foods are out. There are so many unhealthy products at Whole Foods that it is pitiful. One of the silver linings from the pandemic is that when restaurants closed, I realized I didn’t like the experience at most restaurants. I was just being lazy. I started cooking more at home. I’m now at a point where I actively avoid most restaurants. I don’t enjoy the experience. A great sushi restaurant is still on the figurative and literal table. When restaurants started opening back up, I rushed to support them. One by one, I just kept getting disappointed. At my peak eating out phase, I was spending about $2K per month (no alcohol) eating out. I’m now at around $150 per month (primarily Thai or Vietnamese takeout). Even the takeout options have shifted as I try to avoid more fried food (and the oil they’re cooked in). Still, catch me on the wrong day and all the rules are out the door. Like with many things in my current season of life — I’m just opting to be happy. So if you see me have two slices at Pagliacci — smile, it’s a good day.

Gear

I am currently on a pretty simple gear setup. I work primarily at home on my 15" MBA 24GB or Mac Studio Ultra (MSU) with 128GB and two 32" monitors. The MSU is the best computer I’ve ever owned. I use an Opal C1 for my webcam on the MSU. I use a Rode NT-USB mic paired with a $20 boom stand. Fantastic quality for the price. On the video front, I’m shooting on a Sony ZV-E10 and Sigma 16M f/1.4 glass. It’s light, excellent autofocus, and simple to use. There are all sorts of reasons why people complain about this camera (8-bit color, rolling shutter, weak battery, etc.). But the camera just works. And I’d rather get something shot and be done with it. Also have the new Sigma 16-300mm f3.5-6.7 for the camera. It’s soft, but great for travel. I had a rigged out BMPCC 4K. I gave it to some filmmakers I work with. I’m not interested in any new cinema cameras that don’t have Sony-level autofocus. I’m eyeing the Sony FX-3, but for now my simple little Sony ZV-E10 is doing the job. I have an older Skydio drone. Not useful for cinema work, but very difficult to crash. One of the things I can’t let go of is wired headphones. I have a pair of the new Airpods. I’m not a huge fan, but keep them for the noise cancellation and travel convenience.

Talent

I’m a huge advocate of contract and fractional talent. It’s not my secret weapon. I tell everyone. It’s one of the best points of leverage a single person or small team can take advantage of. Over the years, I’ve gotten very good at identifying, interviewing, and landing talent. People might think it’s crazy to put the level of rigor you might put into a full-time hire into a contractor. I put in work when hiring a contractor. There are still duds who flame out immediately and people who fizzle over time as their life dynamics shift. But I’ve found it invaluable to have a team of individuals I can call on on-demand. There’s no cash to burn when there is no active project. But when you need them, you can activate winners. It takes a lot of time to cultivate the right level of trust to get people to work like this. But this approach continues to pay off. I’ve found many friendships through what could have been very transactional relationships. I’m back to being a people manager. I don’t take that responsibility lightly. Managing people is a seasonal thing in my life. I go back and forth. I assume there will be a point where I move out of that role again.

Tech

I started coding again. Fun times to get back to hands-on keyboard. I never enjoyed “proper” software development as a software developer — where I worked on teams. Just not my thing. I’m now writing code that only I will ever have to maintain. Fun times are back. Coding alone is something I genuinely enjoy doing. The upside is that I am moving much faster with new ideas. I can write a one-pager, design screens in Figma, and code a working application faster than I can write a polished PRD. That has unlocked new ideas that would typically be too small to explore with even a small 4-6 person team. I’m writing some of these APIs and web apps for fun. Others are prototypes that are used as signals to validate an idea before I have a proper team go and build maintainable production software. I haven’t gone super deep, but I’m sold on tools like Claude Code and Gemini CLI. My tech stack for the products I build is intentionally rudimentary and old-school. I write web monoliths — no microservices. I’m server-side rendering over single-page apps (with a sprinkle of AplineJS and HTMX). I write in Go and occasionally Python (for AI-related tasks). I love SQLite and usually start there for ideas I’m trying to wrap up in hours or days. I’m not a JS/TS person. No Node or reactive frameworks for me. I would argue solo developers should avoid microservices and library-rampant tools. Simplicity is the reason. It’s easy for me to keep the whole Go language in my head. It’s just not complicated. The beauty of my approach is that I’m fast. And if a project gets popular enough, I can vertically scale the hardware and, in parallel, staff up a team to rewrite the product from scratch (in a team-first approach). Since I don’t write anything too complicated, this has never been an issue. I know enough Dart and Swift for mobile development if needed, but most of my ideas have marketing plans that are built around web apps. Native mobile apps have much more adoption friction. The punchline here is that by simplifying my tech stack, programming is fun again. And because of that, I’m making more things. Win.