now

Writing an About page feels a bit impossible because, like everyone else, my priorities, goals, and focuses are always changing. Life is a movie, not a photo.

So instead of an About page, this is a Now page, inspired by sive.rs/now and all the pages on nownownow.com. I’m not going to delete anything from this page…the newest stuff will always be on top.

Fall 2025

Oops...been a while since I updated this. Much has changed, unsurprisingly.

I closed Highside Workshop about a year ago. It was a hard decision to come to, but a year out I still feel it was the right one. I learned so much from the experiencing of starting, running, and closing that place, and I have no doubt at all that I'll open another community space in the future. I just reached a point where it was clear to me that I needed some time and space (geographically and financially) to figure out what was coming next for me, since the work I'd been doing for years no longer felt fulfilling or important and I needed to figure out how to participate in the world in a way that felt more meaningful. It was also clear to me that I'd made some mistakes with Highside that would be hard to correct without starting over – particularly, starting it by myself (hosting alone is hard) and not being clear about what the purpose of the space was. As part of reflecting on all this, I wrote a bit about the principles of holding community space for Foster's Coauthored publication.

Since Highside closed, I've been floating around the US and Europe, meeting people and fixing all sorts of machines and vehicles and anything else I can get my hands on. I've been struggling with the fact that it seems any path towards more meaningful work is fraught with contradictions. Most ways of being, ways of doing good, ways of trying not to do harm, are full of other ways in which they do exactly the opposite if you choose to look at them from another angle. That paralyzed me for a while: if everything I can possibly do will contribute to the very problems I want to help solve, how do I engage with those problems? This has, I realize in retrospect, been the topic of my last few essays. I've concluded that there's no avoiding this contradiction, and that all I can do is pick a problem that feels important to me and find a way to tackle it with as much integrity as I can muster.

It took me a long time to figure out which problem to pick, and how to begin addressing it in whatever small way I can, but a couple months ago I finally found the beginnings of a path that I think I can happily walk for the foreseeable future.

I have been tinkering with machines since I was 17, when I got my first motorcycle. At first it frustrated me beyond measure, and sometimes it still does...but it also became one of my favorite things to do. It scratches a similar itch to programming, but with a real-world-ness that I find much more satisfying.

I first came across the idea of treating physical goods as sacred in a Charles Eisenstein book, and that really resonated with me – it really bothers me how much we treat the physical things that enable our daily lives as disposable, and sacrifice durability, repairability, and beauty to decrease initial purchase price (as long as you ignore externalities) and enable mass-production. The perfection of brand-new mass-produced goods feels uncanny to me, more like something that belongs on a computer screen than something real.

The art of fixing things instead of throwing them away and replacing them is one that's slowly dying, at least in the developed world. People used to fix things because they had no other option, and in the process they learned to engage with their material world, to care for it, to make it beautiful through care and use. We're losing that. Instead of repairing an old house we knock it down and build a new one. Instead of mending our clothes we throw them away and buy new ones. Instead of making cars simple and repairable, we make them so complicated that no one will fix them when they have serious problems. And so on and so on.

I love fixing things, and I love teaching others how to fix things. So many of us are so disconnected from our material world in a way that feels similar to the disconnection I see in the world more generally – we're disconnected from what it took to make the things we use, disconnected from the resources it took and the labor exerted and the true environmental and social cost of producing yet another thing. And once I engaged with that, I found a certain kind of liberation in realizing that everything around me was built by someone not so different from me, and that I can engage with my physical world and make it better...both in terms of working better and being better to the environment.

So that's what I'm planning on focusing on for the foreseeable future: becoming a better mechanic and all-around craftsman, doing repairs that maybe aren't "economical" because replacement would be cheaper but repair is still doable, and teaching people the basics of repairs via classes, popup repair cafes, and videos. At some point, I'd love to try to figure out what a reproducible localized manufacturing hub would look like, infrastructure that would enable people to design things they need and then produce them locally without needing to contract a company an ocean away to do so.

I also think, in the very long term, there's the potential for a social movement built on the trades – in the US, at least, the trades are a dying art, and someone needs to pick up the slack. If a group of people decided to band together to pick up that slack and agreed on a set of values around their work that prioritized community autonomy and resilience, the environment, and social welfare above maximizing profit by working fast with little concern for material waste or energy consumption, I think they could do a lot of good while still making enough money to keep going.

The trades are traditionally a politically conservative industry, and the agenda I described above sounds quite progressive, but I think it's actually rather non-partisan – community independence and resilience is something that's appealing to conservative values, as is taking care of your physical goods. The environmental argument is a progressive one, which might entice some people into the trades who otherwise wouldn't be interested, since most progressives probably think of the trades as too conservative (and maybe not socially impactful enough) to be interesting to them. Regenerative movements, broadly speaking, can have wide appeal across the political spectrum (if communicated well) to the sorts of people who want healthier communities, less dependence on factors out of their control, and an escape from the neoliberal slide into disconnection from each other, the land, and our built environment. And I see the trades as an opportunity to build a regenerative movement on top of a service that is needed by damn near everyone.

Fall 2023

Well, I could just copy the first sentence from the Spring 2022 entry here:

My priorities have shifted a lot in the past 6-8 months.

It's still true, but in a different way than it was a year ago. I have had somewhat of a reawakening in my attitude towards social causes. I was deeply involved in climate change activism in 2018 and 2019, but got overwhelmed by the pervading sense of doom I felt about the state of the world and disillusioned by the black-and-white thinking I saw on both sides of the issue. Without really realizing it, I stopped thinking about global issues, and rationalized my disengagement by telling myself that by the statistics humanity is doing better than ever...and if we we're truly screwed, what could I possibly do?

In the past 9 months, I've started to re-engage with the world's issues. At first I found it completely emotionally overwhelming–feeling real empathy for every struggling person you see in NYC takes a lot of energy–but I'm learning to filter a little more. I think to stay functional, I have to keep some emotional distance from the issues I want to engage with.

I've found Metamodernism to be a really helpful lens to look through. Metamodernism is a philosophy that acknowledges the paradoxes inherent in life, and works within the truth that there is rarely a Right Answer to anything. Each different lived experience leads to a different perspective on the world, and I think it's both demeaning and arrogant to say that any one perspective is the Right One. Metamodernism formalizes that idea.

The community workshop I referenced in my last entry has grown into a Real Thing (check out @highsideworkshop on Instagram to see what's going on here). Along with that, I've started feeling less and less like a software engineer, and more and more like a community facilitator. It takes an increasing amount of my time and energy to keep it moving in the right direction, and I'm totally ok with that.

Highside has gone through several phases:

• January – June 2022: At first it was a public health hazard (mushrooms growing out of the walls, black mold everywhere, etc). I spent a lot of time renovating.
• July 2022 – February 2023: It suddenly became a venue, and that went quite well...until everyone involved realized that running an underground venue wasn't what we wanted to spend all our time on.
• March – September 2023: Then came a long period of...not much. I went through a breakup that forced me to do a lot of thinking, and during that time I didn't have the energy to make big changes in the direction that Highside was going. I reconsidered nearly every bit of my outlook on life.
• October 2023 – now: I've started to rework Highside to be much more community-oriented. I want this to be a third place for collaborative & creative work, run and directed by the people who use it. Long term, I hope to make it a co-op and mostly remove myself as the manager. We've started having a broader range of events here as a result, which is awesome.

One side effect of spending more time on Highside is that the way I originally used to paid for it – my software consulting business – is making far less money than used to. I care a lot less about money than I used to, so that fact on its own doesn't bother me, but I am starting to think more seriously about how to get Highside to pay for itself, since I won't be able to keep floating it forever. I'm going to resign the lease for one more year, and if by the end of 2024 it's not self-supporting (or damn close), I'm going to have to shut it down. If that happens, I'll be sad but ok with it...I've learned so much from this place, and met so many awesome people.

For the first time in my life, I'm finding that I enjoy traveling alone. I feel a pretty strong pull to go spend a few months wandering around by myself and see what happens. I also would love to learn another language properly – spending a month in Mexico this year made me realize how fun that would be. Whenever I'm not needed at Highside, I think I'm going to spend a while living in Chamonix or some other European mountain town.

That's all for now :)

Spring 2022

My priorities have shifted a lot in the past 6-8 months. I’ve recognized the fact that people are what makes my life meaningful and interesting (major duh, in retrospect) and I’m reorganizing my life around that realization. As a result, I now live in Brooklyn—not something I ever thought I’d say!

I’m working on the biggest project I’ve ever taken on: a community workshop in Bushwick. I’m renovating a crusty old warehouse to make space for working on vehicles, creating art, making music, and anything else that people want to do in here (I’m writing this from the warehouse floor). I’m building a magnet to attract interesting people who love making real, tangible things, whatever that looks like. In a place like Brooklyn where ample space for making things is rare and expensive, this will be a spot for unusual, thoughtful, and motivated people to hang out and make things together. No one will pay unless they feel called to. I’ve never had such a clear vision and goal for anything in my life, and it’s really, really exciting. (I’m giving updates via stories and posts here, if you’re interested.)

On the work side of things, I continue to do consulting work around the Selling Partner API. The open-source PHP SDK I made is now the most-downloaded SP API package on Packagist, with ~30,000 downloads—it’s being used more than anything else I’ve ever made! It’s satisfying making a (small) contribution to the OSS world that I’ve gotten so much help and utility from. I’ve also dived into the crazy world of DAOs, and man is it a blast. I’m an active contributor in Foster (a community of skilled and kind people who edit each other’s work and co-write together) and LabDAO (trying to democratize the biotech research landscape), and a member/participant in several others.

I love this city, but I’m starting to get some serious cravings for the mountains. I need to figure out how to balance the two. My long-term goal is to spend half my time in the city and the other half in the San Juan Mountains, but I haven’t figured out how that’ll work yet. I’ve got time :)

Onward and upward!

Here’s the contents of my old About page, written Fall 2020:

I’m a wandering software engineer. Right now, I’m focused on making it easier for developers to integrate with Amazon’s Selling Partner API. I also do a lot of consulting work with the Selling Partner API. If you’re looking for help with the SP API, get in touch!

More generally, I really enjoy learning how things work at a low level…not just software, but anything. Other topics I enjoy diving deep on are manufacturing processes, the mechanics of vehicles, and technological/political solutions to climate change.

Interesting and fun things I’ve done include:

• working with companies from startups to large companies
• creating a browser extension that had over 25,000 users
• consulting for ADVrider, a motorcycle forum and news site with over 350,000 members
• on a related note, fixing up a broken ’70s motorcycle and riding it across the USA (twice)

Writing

My blog is a smorgasbord of everything from fixing bugs, to climbing mountains, to politics. If you’re interested in learning a little bit more about me, check out the first post!

If you enjoy my writing, you might want to subscribe to my email list! I’ll send you an email whenever I publish a new post.