I’ve been writing on this site for well over a decade. The work here spans entrepreneurship, travel, tech, and now systems thinking, politics and the metacrisis. I’ve curated what’s most relevant for the other pages and left the rest here for anyone interested in the longer arc.
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Ruby Explained: Classes
This post will cover the basics of creating and working with classes in Ruby When you start solving larger problems organization is key. You don’t want 100 different methods and…
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Ruby Explained: Iteration
This post will get into Ruby loops and flow control You can assemble code, tell the program which parts of it to execute, and wrap it all up in a…
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Ruby Explained: Dates and Times
This post will cover the basics of working with dates and times in Ruby When you’re building a website, you’ll inevitably come into contact with dates and times. When was…
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Ruby Explained: Conditionals and Flow Control
This post will get into how Ruby chooses a path through your program, aka "flow control" Now you’ve got an understanding of what tools you can use and it’s time…
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Ruby Explained: Other Random Tidbits
This post will get into a few other random things that are really useful but usually skipped by beginners So What is nil? It represents nothing… literally. Before you assign…
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Ruby Explained: Hashes
This post will get into Hashes, which many Ruby newbies have never seen before but which are incredibly useful Hashes may be a bit intimidating at first but they’re actually…
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Ruby Explained: Arrays
This post will get into Arrays, which is where you really start seeing some of Ruby’s cool programmer-friendly features Arrays are almost as ubiquitous as strings. You’ll be working with…
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Ruby Explained: Strings
This post will cover strings and all the interesting things you can do with them in Ruby. Strings are a huge part of web programming and you’ll run into them…
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Ruby Explained: Objects and Methods
This post will cover objects, methods and some things about classes in Ruby "Everything in Ruby is an Object" is something you’ll hear rather frequently. "Pretty much everything else is…
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Ruby Explained: Numbers, Operators and Expressions
This post will be very brief look at some of the basic numbers, operators, and expressions in Ruby When doing mathematical operations, Ruby expects the result to be the same…
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Lessons Learned in Hustle: Marketing a Weekend Workshop
The other weekend I had the pleasure of teaching a Rails workshop with Daniel Kehoe of RailsApps. I really wanted a chance to do some teaching and organization and Daniel…
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Rebuilding Modern Wanderlust
The Old Building modernwanderlust.com (my old blog site) was a fantastic starter project to break into web development. I basically followed a tutorial on Udemy that used an AMP (Apache/MySQL/PHP)…
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The Odin Project
It’s been some time since I last got the chance to put down some words here and it’s not for lack of anything to say. I’ve been incredibly busy over…
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Taking Collaborative Learning Online
Taking an online course can be a pretty lonely and thankless task. The learning approach is often ported right from university and emphasizes individualized learning and accountability. Many of the…
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Fat-Free Education
The education system is pretty messed up. I don’t think many people will argue with that. Tuition at my alma mater — Penn — rose this year to $39,088, not…
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Maximizing Your Bootcamp Experience
*Note: It’s been a long time since I wrote this and it’s been a surprisingly popular post. Since then, I’ve founded the Viking Code School, an online software engineering program…
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The App Academy Student Journey
*Note: It’s been a long time since I wrote this and it’s been a surprisingly popular post. Since then, I’ve founded the Viking Code School, an online software engineering program…
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Startup Advice from Michael Hartl
Friday at App Academy we had a surprise visit from Michael Hartl, author of the now-famous Ruby on Rails Tutorial. Interestingly, the conversation tracked a wide range of topics that…
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How Harvard’s CS50 Renewed My Hope for Online Education
This fall I took CS50: Intro to Computer Science at Harvard and it was refreshingly, thankfully good. I didn’t take the course *at* Harvard per se, but rather via the…
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The Problem with Being M-Shaped
There’s a lot of noise these days about being “T-shaped.” It’s possessing that great blend of depth in a particular skill area with the ability to see the bigger picture…
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The Apathy Implosion and Lessons in Leadership
I recently had a team implode around me. As is often the case, it wasn’t some external stress that did the job so much as a lack of passion and…
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San Francisco @ t=0
My final week in Houston was hectic. I sold a truck, the motorcycle, and just about everything else that I possibly could in order to extend my personal runway for…
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Site News: Disqus for Commenting
Greetings! I’ve finally done away with the bare-bones commenting interface I had out there before and replaced it with Disqus, something you’ve probably already seen in a hundred places across…
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Trip Superlatives
…Because I’ve been asked: Favorite states to ride: I couldn’t narrow it down to just one, so the top four (in no particular order) are West Virginia, California, Texas, and…
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20,088 miles, 136 days and 46 states: A Retrospective
It’s been a few weeks since I returned to Houston after almost five months on the motorcycle and I’m still not sure the full degree of what I did has…