Welcome to my site! The goal here is to create a long-term home for my writing outside from the serfdoms of rented social media platforms. (I'll still use Substack as an old-school newsletter, but here's where all the source thinking will live.)
I was educated as an architect (2010-2014), worked as a VR technology in my early career (until the pandemic), and have since been obsessively focused on the essay—reading, writing, editing, and building software around the medium. Architecture school was a hardcore experience, and shaped how I view everything.
Inspired by Christopher Alexander, a conviction of mine is that there's a pattern language beneath essays, and that is the root of Essay Architecture. As the lead editor and curriculum designer of Write of Passage, I saw the same concepts emerge across thousands of essays. I won a $100,000 O'Shaughnessy Fellowship to turn the pattern language into a textbook and editing software. In addition to changing how we can teach essays, I'm building something like a quality algorithm to help discover great writing across a sloppifying Internet. I hosted a $10,000 essay prize which leaded to The Best Internet Essays 2025 anthology.
Now I run Essay Club, an annual membership where we all publish monthly, read classics weekly, and get the latest features for the essay software I'm building.
What I'm building is something like a technology-forward institute, using AI to preserve the essay through the age of AI. I won an essay prize through Cosmos Institute at Oxford about "essay writing as personal sovereignty," about the importance of slowly and manually writing to forge your own way of thinking, even if superintelligent AIs can automate the whole process down to a fraction of the time.
Beyond all that fun stuff, this is the place where all the other ideas exist. The goal is to filter as little as possible, and to properly archive ideas so that different sides of me are legible. One day I hope the UI properly resembles a maze with a minotaur and maybe I'll hide my Bitcoin inside.
I'm a new father, which is making me want to sharpen and articulate my virtues, as well as understand the strange singularity we are about to go through, the world my daughter will grow up in. I like to imagine that she will one day, many decades from now, be interested in reading this, in the same way that I'm interested in the mystery of family history. It's a long game. If you scanned a QR code off my tombstone to get here, you're in the right place.