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RSS FeedThoughts on Christian Voluntarism, technology, and personal growth
The Firefighting Trap: Why Reactive Work Feels Productive
That satisfying rush when you swoop in to fix a crisis? It's a trap. Firefighting feels productive: the dopamine hit, the hero moment, the grateful emails. But feeling productive and being productive are two different things. A year from now, you might look back at twelve months of heroic saves and realize you never moved forward. Here's why reactive work is so seductive, and how to break the cycle before December arrives with nothing to show for it.
The Archaeology of Legacy Code: Reading Systems Like Texts
Legacy code isn't a mess to fix; it's a site to excavate. You're sifting through artifacts left by developers you'll never meet, reading their structures like ancient texts: the original architecture, the evolutionary mutations, the emergency patches that became permanent. Learn to recognize which layer you're in, extend grace to builders working with limited tools, and discover why the best archaeologists write code future excavators can actually read.
The Theosis of Work: Sanctification Through Craft
Work isn't separate from spiritual formation; it's one of the primary places it happens. Every frustrating client is an opportunity for grace. Every tedious task is a chance to choose excellence when no one's watching. Every success tests your humility. The Eastern Church Fathers called this process theosis: ongoing transformation into something greater. What if your Monday morning grind is actually shaping your soul?
Managing Energy, Not Just Time
A perfectly optimized schedule wasn't saving me from the 3pm crash. Every hour accounted for, calendar color-coded, and I was still running on fumes, watching my productivity crater. The problem wasn't my time management. It was my energy management. What I discovered after flipping my entire routine upside down changed how I think about productivity itself.
The Best Code I Wrote Was the Code I Deleted
Five hours with Claude trying to build testcontainer pooling for Rust. A deadpool implementation that saved nothing. 200 lines of daemon architecture. Then Claude offhandedly mentioned the reusable-containers feature it knew about all along. CI dropped from 7m30s to 5m30s. AI assistants follow your framing. Frame the problem wrong, and they'll efficiently help you build the wrong solution.
Anatomy of a Failing Project: Patterns I've Seen
Six months in, I realized we were building the wrong thing. We didn't get fired, but that failure taught me something: project disasters follow predictable patterns. Excessive rework, stakeholders who won't engage, teams where nobody owns anything: the warning signs are always there. I've seen projects limp across the finish line enough times to know what to watch for. Here's what failure actually looks like, and how to spot it before you're already off the rails.
Why I Call It "Intelligence Augmentation," Not "Artificial Intelligence"
The term "artificial intelligence" is a lie. Not in the sense that these tools don't work. They obviously work. I use them every day. But the phrase itself creates expectations that don't match reality, and those false expectations lead to bad decisions, wasted resources, and a fundamental misunderstanding of what we're actually building. I started calling it "Intelligence Augmentation" instead. Not as a branding exercise or a hot take, but because that's what it actually is.
Almost Building a Production Microblog in One Weekend: The Receipts
Most people claim they built something with AI. Few show the receipts. Here's what it actually looks like to build a full-stack microblog with AI assistance, complete with git commits, test coverage, and honest reflections on what worked and what didn't.