Holding community space
An incomplete guide to building community spaces.
Latest
Aching together
Heartbreak lives somewhere new every season. Summer wears it proudly. It's hidden underneath the crinkling leaves in fall, and I walk over it and can just hear it crying out. But then winter comes and the cold muffles its cries. Thank god, I think guiltily, I can relax
Back to earth
I boarded a three-day train from Massachusetts to Los Angeles last week with an 80-pound bag of tools, on my way to do paid work in the physical world instead of the digital one for the first time since high school. I've tinkered with different kinds of machines for
A walking contradiction
I forgot to bring my travel mug on a 4,000 mile drive across the US. Shame on me, at every gas station fuel-and-caffeine fill up. I prostrate myself before the neon gods of every almost-beautiful 24-hour rest area. I feel the weight of the carbon blowing from my tailpipe
Slow down, you crazy child
What if I did less?
Smiling at strangers
My cashier at the grocery store looked angry yesterday. Shit, I’d probably be angry too, getting paid a pittance to move food I can hardly afford myself from left to right all day. I eye-smiled at her as I handed her my card, and for a second I could
Graveyard tourism
I've been running a lot. Running in New York is like playing Frogger, except instead of splattering you on the pavement, people usually just honk or give you the finger. Ah, New York. To escape the video game, I've started running through the seemingly infinite cemeteries
An unexpected hug
I was biking home from Home Depot one day with 50 pounds of tools in my backpack, and stopped at a red light in Bed Stuy. As I waited, four young-ish men walked across the street in front of me. I glanced at them, and three of them looked back
Day and night
A walk through the patterns of my life
Building the next wave of community institutions
My search for community, and my mission to build the community I want to be a part of.
Finding a new dimension
My ongoing journey into letting go, thinking less, and feeling more.
Seeking the edge
The pleasure of searching for my limits.
amazon
Implementing the Selling Partner API OAuth flow
Before you can list a Selling Partner API application on the Marketplace Appstore, you need to set up an authorization workflow. Here's how.
amazon
How to use my Selling Partner API PHP library
I released a PHP client library for the Selling Partner API in hopes of making the API easier to connect to and use.
amazon
A basic application with Amazon’s Selling Partner API
Since writing this post, I've switched over to using the Selling Partner API almost exclusively via my open-source PHP library. As a result, I'm no longer maintaining these Java instructions, so they may be out of date. (This post continues where the last post, How to
amazon
How to access the Amazon Selling Partner API
Everything you need to know to get access to the new Amazon Selling Partner API.
amazon
Amazon MWS is dead. Long live the Selling Partner API!
…well, sort of. In a few days, Amazon is releasing a new marketplace API that sellers can use to programmatically control their seller accounts. It’s called the Selling Partner API, or SP for short. SP is a major upgrade from MWS—let’s look at how the two services
college
Why I dropped out of college
The experiences, situations, and thoughts that led me to choose a new path.
mindset
People, not numbers
Statistics blind us to the importance of individuals.
experience
Embrace the suck
Wrap your arms around it and dance.
functional programming
Types vs. datatypes vs. typeclasses in Haskell
I learned the words type, datatype, and typeclass in rapid succession while reading Haskell Programming from First Principles. Here's how they are different.
consumption
“Create more, consume less” is an oversimplification
The common phrase "create more, consume less" is overly reductive and ignores the meaningful differences between forms of consumption.
emacs
Using the (function …) target in org-capture
In the past two months, I’ve started diving into Emacs. (Skip to “The problem” for information about org-capture’s (file …) target.) Over the past 6-8 months, I’ve been struggling to find a good way to store my notes, todos, and other random data. I tried bending Google Drive
Instinctual Politics
Human inclinations Humans are evolutionarily hard-wired to stick to our guns. Back when we lived in small tribes, it was important for everyone in the tribe to believe the same things. When everyone in the group had the same beliefs and belief systems, the tribe was more united and better