I've read many great novels, but this is my favorite. I wrote an essay framed by the novel here.

I'm all for creating healthy boundaries that keep us satisfied and emotionally healthy—inside and outside of work. And of course I believe you can love something without it having to hurt. But I've never truly loved anything that didn't move me to my core. I can't help but wonder if all this effort we're putting into keeping work at arm's length is actually holding us back from being our best selves.

Because what I've learned from having the privilege of working in a place that asks for my best and helps me get there is how much it can unlock in a life. The benefits extend far beyond the skills required to get great work done. The really, really good stuff comes from looking back on something you created and thinking, "I had no idea I could do that." It comes from looking around and thinking "wow these people helped me, really helped me, get there."

This one comes to mind often, but not because the piece itself drove a particular revelation. Instead, it articulates a benefit of expressive type systems that I came to cherish by writing my own programs.

Type systems like Haskell's and Rust's let programmers precisely state and enforce invariants about values. By doing so, you can eliminate entire classes of problems that exist when writing programs in other languages. It's an illuminating experience. In my opinion, this post is so well-known because it makes such a good case for type-driven design.

This is another gem from bookbear express. It makes me reflect on acting with intention, on projecting interiority, and, of course, on loving wholeheartedly.

It's easy to be nonchalant. It's easy to pretend to be above it all. But my favorite conversations and closest friendships exist because of times I've been totally vulnerable and totally true to myself.

This piece is absolutely worth reading in its entirety. It's an accessible introduction to stateful firewalls and Network Address Translators in the real world. I learned a lot by reading it. It's also just fascinating reading about the different tricks that Tailscale uses to holepunch and establish connectivity.

No particular notes, this just resonates a lot.

sometimes i wonder if the people i've grown apart from know that if they need me, i'm still here. even if we broke up, even if i moved away, even if you hurt me, even if i hurt you, the offer still stands. i continue to hold on to a bit of everyone i've ever cared about in case i'll ever need it.

i know too much about you to stand aside and watch you fall without offering my hand. i know right now i have to walk past you and pretend we've never been anything more than strangers, but i still think about you and i wonder if you think about me too.

I just think about this one a lot. I really love the sentiment.

In another piece I love that touches on similar themes, Ava writes about never getting over the people we love, platonically or romantically. I'm sure that some people that I truly speak freely to will one day become people that I used to talk to. Yet, they'll probably also be with me forever.

A fantastic essay on meaning. I absolutely adore the way this ends.

Here, I wrote about how this short story changed how I approached my relationship with my parents.

Each issue is a precise and fascinating explanation of some part of the financial system.

For me, the broader takeaway from reading all of these is that my mental model of large organizations should consider various incentive structures at play. Observable behavior that seems unreasonable can become legible when viewed with a new lens.

I don't think I could write a sufficient note about it. It's fantastic.

This piece was once freely available but is now paywalled.

This essay says a lot of things that I also believe about what it means to have taste. Like many other bookbear express posts, it also motivates me to articulate my own thoughts on interiority.

The idea from the essay that really stuck with me is the importance of both giving and taking well. For the longest time, I thought of my contribution to conversations as asking thoughtful questions. I never felt like I had anything interesting to share outright.

I see now, because of the essay and personal experience, the value of unprompted sharing as a jumping off point for interesting conversations. Being conscious of sharing more, of providing doorknobs, has hopefully helped build some better conversations.

Also incredibly good. On asymmetry and maturity.

Writing on the internet made me think harder about my relationship with seeking attention. By default, I have a strong aversion to it; even with my work on this website, I don't really try to distribute it or anything. Part of that is because it feels so self-important to write and share long-form work. Rayne Fisher-Quann said it best:

I think that writing and sharing long-form writing is basically just embarrassing, and I lived in fear of being seen as pretentious, self-important, so narcissistic that I actually believed anyone cared what I had to say. Because it literally is self-important and narcissistic to believe that people should care what you have to say! and writing long-form is embarrassing! It requires a lot of extended effort, often for zero tangible reward and low artistic return, sustained only by the completely delusional belief that Your Voice Matters.

I still catch myself thinking this way, but I think phire makes a great point against this frame in "kill the metrics in your head". Wanting to feel heard is just human. It feels silly to say, but writing on the internet in general made me much more empathetic for other internet writers; I put more effort now into letting people know when I liked their work.

This piece goes over Community Notes and why it is so interesting. I don't think it replaces centralized fact-checking or moderation, but it is a scalable tool where "cross-tribal approval" of notes is an emergent property of the algorithm; isn't that awesome!?

I recommend at least reading the first half of the piece.

Succinct and well-written. Distrbuted systems was my favorite CS elective in university, so I have a soft-spot for the subject matter. Since I haven't worked professionally on any distributed systems yet, I'm also the target audience :)