Writing on distributed computing, payments, startups, economics and AI.

Long-form writing from building at the intersection of money and intelligence: distributed systems, payments, startups, economics and AI.

Does the physics do the work?

What does an untrained network of coupled oscillators add to spoken-digit recognition? How a 6,353-run study tested it, with every model live in your browser.

How a machine hears a number

A progressive guide to speech models, from pressure waves and mel spectrograms to a coupled-oscillator core, with every figure computed live in your browser.

What is the value of cryptocurrency vs. blockchain?

Why crypto and not just blockchain? The nuance lies in how the properties of cryptocurrency—immutability, verifiability, and programmability—can produce new ways of organizing our social fabric.

Social Media, Social Incentives & Money

How a formative trip to South Korea taught me we're all fundamentally the same—and why that shapes how I think about money, social media, and the forces that drive human behaviour.

Taxation of Employee Stock Options

A practical guide to how stock options are taxed in Canada—when you pay, what you owe, and key differences for employees vs. contractors.

Sales Tax 101 for Canadian Startups

A practical guide to navigating GST, HST, PST, and international sales tax for Canadian startups selling online—whether physical goods, SaaS, or services.

October 2017 FeathersJS Community Update

The Feathers v3 (Buzzard) prerelease, what changed in the ecosystem, and where the community was putting its energy.

The Auk Takes Flight!

A new FeathersJS release and a year in review

“Hiring” Open Source

Part 2: how we onboard, support and retain Feathers contributors — recruiting for a project nobody is paid to work on.

Meet The New Feathers Core Team

Handing a growing open source project to a real core team: who joined, how we chose them, and why stepping back was the right call.

What’s Next For Feathers?

Where Feathers came from, and the roadmap after the 2.0 release — authentication, the service ecosystem, and what the core team took on next.

Levelup, RethinkDB, and More Docs

A FeathersJS ecosystem update: LevelUP and RethinkDB adapters, and a documentation push to make a modular framework easier to keep up with.

A Recipe for Building Successful Products

A repeatable process for building products people want, drawn from the times I built features on a whim and watched them land flat.

The Future of Analytics

A critique of the analytics tools of the era and where the category was heading, written from three years of using them and building one.

The Real Cost of Starting a Startup

The true cost of building a product, counted honestly — the money, the time, and the parts of the bill nobody warns you about.

Go Pitch Your Product to an 8 Year Old

The fastest test of whether you understand your own product: explain it to a child and see how quickly they cut through it.