Long-form thoughts from building at the intersection of money and intelligence — distributed systems, payments and programmable money, startups, economics, and AI. Collected in chronological order.
A progressive guide to speech model architectures — pressure waves, Fourier transforms, mel spectrograms, vocoders, and a coupled-oscillator core — where every figure is computed live in your browser from real recordings of spoken digits.
An experiment testing whether humans can distinguish real photos from AI-generated ones. Spoiler: 84% of people got it wrong.
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.
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.
A practical guide to how stock options are taxed in Canada—when you pay, what you owe, and key differences for employees vs. contractors.
Hint, it’s not whiteboard coding tests and random LinkedIn messages 😉
A practical guide to navigating GST, HST, PST, and international sales tax for Canadian startups selling online—whether physical goods, SaaS, or services.
The Feathers v3 (Buzzard) prerelease, what changed in the ecosystem, and where the community was putting its energy.
A new FeathersJS release and a year in review
Part 2: how we onboard, support and retain Feathers contributors — recruiting for a project nobody is paid to work on.
Part 1: your open source project needs a vision, positioning and a roadmap for the same reasons a commercial product does.
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.
Where Feathers came from, and the roadmap after the 2.0 release — authentication, the service ecosystem, and what the core team took on next.
A FeathersJS ecosystem update: LevelUP and RethinkDB adapters, and a documentation push to make a modular framework easier to keep up with.
How FeathersJS came to be and why we built it.
What actually happened when we put FeathersJS on Product Hunt: the preparation, the numbers, and what moved the needle versus what didn't.
A minimalist real-time framework for tomorrow’s apps
Socket.io's client assumes a browser, and React Native isn't one. What you actually have to do to get the two talking.
A response to Eran Hammer on maintainer burnout. Entitlement in open source is real, but public shaming makes a bad situation worse.
A repeatable process for building products people want, drawn from the times I built features on a whim and watched them land flat.
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 true cost of building a product, counted honestly — the money, the time, and the parts of the bill nobody warns you about.
Even great services can still be painful
The fastest test of whether you understand your own product: explain it to a child and see how quickly they cut through it.