What I'm doing now

This is a Now page and was last updated May 3, 2024

Questions

There are a few questions I’m particularly invested in right now:

What lessons can be generalized from skill acquisition / motor learning research to non-motor expertise?
Closely related: how general can a theory of expertise even be?
What blocks exist to taking knowledge and skills from experts and teaching them directly to novices? (For instance: maybe experts do X, but you can only do X successfully if you already know Y, so you can’t just teach novices X)
What’s the lowest-friction stack for building extremely personal applications and tools?

Work

I’ve been contracting / freelancing for about a year now; I’ve spent most of that time working with a company at the intersection of web3 and AI, helping them build out their offerings. At the same time, I’ve also been thinking a lot about those questions above, and I’d love to find a role where I could focus on them full-time.

Expertise

Obviously, this is my primary interest right now (even the low-friction stack is related; I want it to be as easy and quick as possible to build tools and experiments to test out means of accelerating the development of expertise and understanding).

Concretely, I’ve finally launched a podcast that I’ve wanted to exist for literally years - Ten Thousand is a series of conversations with people all along the road to expertise in a specific domain. The first season is about software development, and I was able to talk to someone a few months into their first professional job, someone who’s had several distinct phases to their career over a decade or so, someone who’s deeply technical after 25 years in industry, and one of the signers of the Agile Manifesto. I’m planning the next season now, and I’m really excited about it.

Family

We remain happy and healthy; we’re in the exact middle of our birthday season (two of us down, two to go), so it’s a fun time. We’re in the final stretches of 6th and 10th grade, and looking forward to the summer!