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Happy 4/20. Here’s your Monday Letter for April 20th, 2026. Geno Is Score I’ll start by saying something controversial: I like sports. You might think that is not controversial at all, but I’m not sure it’s safe to say in San Francisco. There’s a place called “Sports Basement” where you can, sure, buy hiking boots, but good luck finding a football (of any variety). I get visceral enjoyment, and real inspiration, from watching a bunch of sweaty dudes I’ve never met try to put an object into a tar...

It’s April. Did you get pranked on the first? My friend did, by a Waymo. The car told its riders to start humming to help the vehicle “calibrate” before the ride could start. Ha. Ha. Here’s the Monday Letter for April 6th, 2026. Line Dancing Line dancing is one of the best new things I’ve been doing this year. Every Sunday night, I stroll down to Lower Haight to join friends at the aptly named Lower Haight Line Dancing ("LHLD" from here on out, because that’s a mouthful). From 6 to 10pm, a handf...

And… we’re back! I’ve had a busy last couple of weeks, with trips to Whistler and New York. Lots to talk about. This is the Monday Letter for March 30th, 2026 (and March 23rd and March 16th). Give the agents an Autobahn Issue tracking is dead. Or so says the CEO of the hottest issue tracking company. As someone who works at another sort of issue tracking company (really, an everything tracking company), I don’t fully agree, but there’s some truth to it. What I think is dead is the how, more than...

Hello from thirty-four thousand, nine hundred and ninety-one feet. I’m on a return flight from Vancouver to San Francisco, and it is four hours to midnight, so it’s probably time for a letter. Slopes I spent this past weekend in Whistler, BC. It felt great to be back in Canada, and I felt great on the skis this time around. I’m a fairly average skier: comfortable on all blues, most blacks, and in solid conditions, I’ll occasionally attempt a double-black. I had the chance to ski with some great ...

Hello! It’s been a while. I hope you’re doing well. One of my big goals for 2026 is to create more, and one of my favorite ways to create is to write. It’s March, so it feels like high time to get started. To reboot my newsletter, I’ll be sharing some thoughts, plus what I’m reading, watching, or listening to, in a short weekly letter, on Mondays (though if I’m late for that, I’ll probably publish mid-week anyway). Here’s the first edition of The Monday Letter. Enjoy! Put yourself on the critica...

(And how I discovered—I think—the Google Messages Gemini assistant's system prompt.) Gemini is brilliant technology. As the first model to outperform humans on MMLU, with its million-token windows and impressive results on SWE-Bench 2.5—the talented team at DeepMind is achieving remarkable things. So, why hasn't this technical excellence translated into meaningful improvements across Google's product ecosystem? As a long-time Android user (from the HTC era through acquisition—I had the HTC One M...

I need to start with a confession. I don’t actually have a degree yet. But in ten days, I finally will. I know—it’s strange. Haven’t I been working full-time in San Francisco for nearly a year? There's more to the story, of course. Nearly a year ago, I effectively graduated—completing my undergraduate coursework with a final edit to a machine learning survey paper on sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoEs) (which is most certainly outdated by now). But why didn't I get my degree? It came down to timing...

This winter break, I re-wrote my personal website. It went great. Here’s the behind-the-scenes story. Motivation In the summer of 2020 (—in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, locked in my parent’s basement), I, as a bright-eyed computer science freshman, decided to take on a nobel endeavor: re-writing my personal website. My previous instances (v1, v2, and v3) had used Jekyll (i.e., a lot of mangled HTML and CSS, managed with Ruby). I had recently learned React, and was overall a much more comp...

If I got hit by a bus and forgot everything I knew about computer science [1], here is how’d I re-learn it [2]. Inspired by Robert Heaton’s “Projects for Advanced Beginners” (link) and a bunch of random knowledge I’ve accumulated over time. ‼️ Are you already someone with knowledge in the field of computer science, and looking for resources or opportunities? I encourage you to look at csjobs2 instead. This is my curated list of every-resource-ever I considered in undergrad, and has suggestions f...