The Headline: Slowing down on purpose. Launching a privacy first watch app.
This month I’ve been really trying to maximize my time outside, biking or walking home from the office, taking longer walks with the dog and trying to grill out as much as possible. Though the smoke from the wildfires really put a damper on those plans this month. It has also forced me to be more offline and off screen which has been refreshing for a change.
Posts
June 2026 Review — Review of June 2026, was thinking a lot about optimizing my sleep last month.
Emergency Preparedness for Managers: A Simple Runbook That Works — Nobody trains new managers for the death, the disaster, or the shocking event, so build the runbook before you need it, not while you're too rattled to think.
Hogline Is Out — I shipped Hogline, a curling scorekeeper and shot tracker for Apple Watch that logs a stone in three taps and hands you shot-level stats so you can finally see which turn is quietly falling apart.
Books That Stuck
Animal Farm by George Orwell — A quick read that lands harder every time: how the language of a revolution gets quietly rewritten until "all animals are equal" grows its infamous second half.
A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness by Michael Pollan — I was hoping for more on this topic, but the book left me wanting. “we still dont know” is the 4 word summary.
Spaceship Mechanic by Jamie McFarlane — Blew through all three (starting with Boltguns and Duct Tape) this month; comfort-food sci-fi where the hero fixes things instead of shooting them, and that competence-over-heroics angle is exactly why it went down so easy.
Some Links
Don’t Let Your Boss Do Your Job — Kevin Goldsmith on ownership as a behavior, not a feeling: signal, route, verify. The point that stuck with me is that losing credibility rarely comes from inaction — it comes from staying quiet. When you go silent on a problem, the organization reads it as nobody's on it, and eventually your boss steps in and does your job in front of everyone.
Managers: Choose what signals you’re sending about AI — Everyone's carrying Big Feelings about AI and the state of the world into work, and because humans mirror each other, your mood quietly becomes the room's mood. A thermometer just reads the temperature; a thermostat sets it. The reminder that stuck with me: as a leader you're broadcasting something whether you mean to or not, so notice when the vibe shifts and consciously reset it in a healthy direction instead of letting anxiety compound.
AI Job Grief: The Unnamed Psychological Crisis Hitting Tech Workers — Jack Maguire argues that what tech workers are feeling about AI displacement is closest to grief, not just fear or burnout — and for knowledge workers whose expertise is bound up with identity, losing the work means losing a piece of the self.
The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription — These tools are an attention problem more than a capability one: a "quick script for X" becomes an hour-long tangent, and friction was the thing that used to force focus and commitment. When the effort is removed, so is the product. The line that stuck: for as long as quality matters, handwriting can never be obsolete.
Fits on a Floppy — Matt Sephton's manifesto for small software, measured against a single yardstick: 1.44 MB, the capacity of a 3.5" floppy. If the apps that once ran whole businesses fit in that space, a modern single-purpose tool has no excuse to demand gigabytes. He's clear it isn't nostalgia — he doesn't miss floppies, he misses the mindset they forced, where every byte mattered and constraints bred creativity. A nice palate cleanser after all the AI-slop-and-bloat reading: a reminder that restraint is still a design discipline worth practicing.## Life Lately
Life Lately
The Canadian wildfire smoke really took a toll on Chicago for about a week — the AQI was the highest I've ever seen it, and stepping outside smelled like a campfire. Despite that, we still got in some nice meals outdoors and some good tourist days with my visiting family, including an architecture boat tour.
Been getting into cooking real meals at home again, not just thrown-together bits of food. Part of that has been pulling fresh produce from the farmers markets around the city.
Found a new tattoo place to start chipping away at the backlog of ideas I've got, but first, a quick little piece of something important to me.
Took the pup on his first dog beach this month. He loved it and ran around like crazy. Fun to see how much he enjoyed it, even if we were a little nervous watching him swim in the lake.
As the month winds down I've been trying to disconnect a bit. While my sister and nephew were in town my phone usage was down to about 2.86 hours a day on average, mostly looking up places, photos, and parking passes. The rest of the time we were around the kitchen table playing Doomlings and Ticket to Ride.
One Thing to Carry Forward
Storytelling is the magic key that unlocks doors in your career and life. Draw people in and don’t disappoint them with boring details.