What I'm doing NOW

Currently working with select partners on boutique educational products for developers. Some of that work is documented on badass.dev

I've been hyper focused on the exploration of our next-gen CMS for researching, designing, producing, and delivering educational content. It's called Course Builder and it is a combination of all the processes, tools, and techniques that we've developed over the past 10 years of building educational products for developers.

It's using AI (large-language models) to assist in a classy way and is built on top of a modern, serverless, cloud-native stack. It's a lot of fun and I'm learning a ton.

In 2022 I released a podcast series focused on Badass Course Builders. It is focused on the business of building educational products for web developers as independant creators.

Total TypeScript is a learning site that we are working on with Matt Pocock that focuses on teaching intermediate to advanced TypeScript for working web developers. In December of 2022 we did a pre-release launch and then did the full release of the Core Volume in April of 2023.

The full Total TypeScript case study can be found here.

Learning

• Neural Networks: Zero to Hero by Andrej Karpathy is a deep dive, diy, from scratch introduction to neural networks. It is a great way to learn the fundamentals of neural networks and how they work. It's got a decent handful of calculus, linear algebra, and python which can all be challenging, but in the best sort of way. I highly recommend it.
• Building a small in-house data center "home lab" for machine learning and personal education. Taking lots of notes and learning a ton about networking, system administration, gpu-accelerated workflows, linux, and more.

Health and Fitness

In December of 2022 I committed to a year of working with a My Body Tutor coach. Working with Walter has been great and not what I expected at all. It was support and encouragement, but also accountability and a bit of tough love.

After a year I've lost 60 pounds and feel great.

One big change for me was switching from a "weight loss" goal to an overall "active fitness" goal.

Thinking about the activities that have for the most part been physically impossible for me, or at least very difficult, and how to make them possible. I'm also thinking about how to make fitness a part of my life in a way that is sustainable and enjoyable.

One big change for me was adding daily yoga stretching focused on hip mobility using this program from Yoga Body. It's been life changing and I can't overstate how much better my body feels. In the past I've got straight for the heavy weight lifting, but would eventually get derailed by injury and pain. This time I'm taking a different approach and focusing on mobility and flexibility first.

To kick it up a notch, I joined the local crossfit gym and it's been fantastic. I love not having to think about it and just show up, do the work, and go about my day.

I've also been skateboarding a bit, which is something I've always wanted to do, but was too scared and lazy to really try. My physical therapist would like to have a word. lol

Modular Synthesis

For the past several years I've been exploring sound design and music adjacent noise with an ever evolving, complex, gnarly, beast of a eurorack system that I love like a 6th child.

I release on tik tok as __noise_complaint if you're into that sort of thing.