Writings
17 Aug 2025
32 Optimistic Charts: The World is Getting Better
The world often feels like it’s falling apart, but the data tells a different story. Here are 32 charts showing measurable human progress across health, education, technology, environment, and human rights.
Last updated: 2025-08-17
16 Bad Things That Are Decreasing #
Maternal Deaths #
Deaths per 100,000 live births
15 Aug 2024
In software engineering, we often focus on the technical side of our work—designing scalable systems, writing clean code, and mastering our tools. But the most impactful lessons are often learned in the spaces between the pull requests. They’re about people, trust, and self-awareness. Here are a few hard-learned lessons from my time building and scaling infrastructure.
Lesson 1: A Technical Win Can Be a Team Loss #
When I joined Substack, the company was running on about 40 Heroku dynos. A migration to AWS had been discussed, but three months into my tenure, no real movement had occurred.
14 Aug 2024
Building Real-Time Infrastructure at Substack
How we built a scalable real-time Pub/Sub system that handles a billion messages per week.
12 Nov 2023
A collection of personal principles.