What I'm Doing Now

Building

This website is still the foundation for everything else on my roadmap. Built with Astro, Tailwind, and deployed on Vercel. On top of it I've been shipping the guides I kept re-explaining to people: The One Paste (sets someone up in Claude Cowork in under 10 minutes), a full Cowork guide, an AI setup guide for the Journeymen Triangle mentorship nonprofit, and an enablement guide for a coworker getting started.

The Cowork OS plugin is done: six skill cards and the four-part guide. So are the rebuilt RPI skills, which came out of one idea worth stealing: the handoff document is the real product of each phase, not the pile of work behind it. The Claude Starter Kit on GitHub is still the canonical "here's how I actually use Claude" package.

What changed this summer is what I'm building less of. I hit peak AI frenzy, automated everything I could reach, and then came back down. I use AI more than ever and I build far less scaffolding around it. The hard part of my job was never the automatable part.

Working

Product management in the Salesforce ecosystem, building workflow tools for highly regulated industries. That's the day job, and it's not going anywhere. I like it.

Automated Investing

The investing machine is done and has run five months without me touching it. A 70/20/10 split: 70% in automated index funds, 20% in a capped set of stocks I actually believe in, and 10% in cash held back for the next drop. In October I gave that cash a trigger: three lines below the S&P 500's 52-week high, pre-written buy amounts for when one is crossed, and a scheduled check that tells me the exact numbers to change in Fidelity. I call it the Dip Ladder, and the full write-up is on the project page. The investing page lists the actual funds and their expense ratios.

Experimenting

Deep into AI tools, still trying to separate what works from what makes a good demo video. The full breakdown of the tools I use lives on the homepage, but the short version: Wispr Flow for voice, Claude Cowork as the backbone, MCP connections as the glue, and Incogni plus Claude for monthly privacy sweeps.

Granola used to be on this list for meeting notes. I love it and wish I still used it, but Claude, Codex, and Notion work close enough, and most of my meetings happen at work, where Notion recording is supported.

Playing

The five-night Magic campaign I built to teach my wife Bailey and her friend Dibya is finished. We went straight into four-player Commander afterward and they now want to build their own decks. The whole write-up, the custom cards with their faces on them, and the AI art that went badly wrong first are all on the Magic page, along with all eight of my Commander decks.

I am also back in Warcraft III, playing the new Forsaken Kingdom campaign and overanalyzing it on purpose: I pulled every hero ability, talent, item, and quest out of the game files and turned it into The Missing Manual.

Thursdays used to be the Context Window meetup. We ran it eight weeks, learned a lot, and ended it on purpose. Thursdays are pickleball now.

The Family AI Report

I was going to build my newly-retired parents a whole algorithm detox. Then both of them picked up AI on their own and went somewhere I never would have sent them, which was mildly humbling and extremely funny.

Last Christmas they both got paid subscriptions to premium AI services from me, followed by an eight hour in-person workshop from yours truly. This year they are hoping not to repeat that.

My dad makes AI music now. Not casually. Prolifically. It is a full retirement hobby and he is more consistent about shipping than I am. Go listen to it.

My mom builds pickleball training camp programs with it, full session plans and drill progressions, while also running Serve With Joy, a professional wait staff service for events around Raleigh. Weddings, rehearsal dinners, holiday parties, family reunions. Setup, serving, cleanup, and she will handle the beverage service and the catering referrals too.

So to be clear about the household standings: my mother runs a small business and a pickleball curriculum, my father is a working musician, and I write blog posts about folder structure. If you are throwing an event anywhere near Raleigh, hire my mom. She is better at this than I am at anything.

Cleaning Up

The big one is done. I pulled my data off more than 30 platforms, normalized 389,508 rows of it into 219 standardized CSVs covering 2008 to 2026, backed the archive up twice, and then deleted the accounts one at a time. Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, all of it. I own 100% of my own history now and none of those platforms do. The full write-up is here, including what 18 years of your own data actually says about you.

Still ongoing: the monthly online presence scrub. Incogni handles the automated data broker removals, I do a manual sweep with Claude once a month, and my parents and Bailey are on the family plan.

Reading & Listening

Always have an audiobook or podcast going. I tend to run wide on topics: business, finance, news, politics, tech. When things get busy, I narrow the lens to just what I can control: my job, the tech I'm building with, and my wife Bailey. Check out my books, podcasts, and YouTube creators for the full picture.

Past Adventures

During COVID I went deep on VR as a hobby. Full Valve Index setup, full body tracking, custom mods, tons of experiments. ThrillSeeker's YouTube channel got me through the dark times. It was genuinely fun, but at the end of the day it was a lot of work to set up, hard to play for more than 40 minutes, and awkward in a shared living space. Amazing tech, not quite frictionless enough yet. Still think it's the future though.