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.

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.

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.

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 As a result, I'm no longer maintaining these Java instructions, so they may be out of date.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

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

fun

The Fun Scale

There’s a 3-value “fun scale” that I love. * Type 1 Fun: Type 1 fun is fun while you’re doing it. Downhill skiing, finding a beautiful view, and the moment when you summit a peak are all examples of Type 1 fun. Basically, it’s what you already thought

bias

Thoughts on Bulgaria

Until recently, Bulgaria seemed to me to exist only in legend. I didn’t know anyone who had been there, there wasn’t anything there I’d heard of, and as a country that was behind the iron curtain for over 40 years, my only mental image of Eastern Europe

c

Tracking down a segfault in malloc_consolidate()

I’ve been making my way through From NAND to Tetris, a self-guided course that gives you the knowledge to go from having only a simulated NAND gate, through building a basic (simulated) CPU, all the way to writing an OS on top of your simulated hardware that can run

first-post

Welcome!

For a long time, I’ve wanted a place to share my thoughts, ideas, and projects with the world. Some of the world’s best thinkers have said that writing helps them clarify their thoughts and ideas. Since clearer thinking and better communication is nearly always a good thing, I