Blog
On Long-term Thinking
There’s a concept in evolutionary biology called the “adjacent possible”, it’s about exploring what’s reachable from where you are now, the space of possibilities that opens up with each step forward. Stuart Kauffman used it to describe how biological systems evolve, but I’ve come to see it as the perfect metaphor for navigating careers in our accelerating world. Hence why I named my company Adjacent Possible Tech. The irony of writing about long-term thinking in 2025 is that the very concept feels like it’s undergoing time dilation. We used to plan infrastructure projects with 5+ year burn-down periods. Systems were built with 10+ year lifecycles. Now? Even outside the AI frenzy, the tech industry moves so fast that what we used to call “long-term” is barely medium-term. It’s like we’re living in a temporal compression chamber where the future arrives before we’ve finished planning for it.
October 22, 2025
On Imposter Syndrome
This is going to be a hard one. Imposter syndrome is something I’ve wrestled with my entire career, and I suspect many of you have too. After 25 years in tech, multiple career transitions, and countless “oh shit” moments, I’ve come to realize something counterintuitive: imposter syndrome might actually be a feature, not a bug. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me start by unpacking what this beast actually is, where it comes from, and why it’s simultaneously the thing that’s held me back and pushed me forward throughout my career.
October 1, 2025
On Theories, Laws and Effects
When I started at AWS in 2016, I didn’t know it at the time but I was about to start learning about various theories, laws and effects. My manager, Simon, introduced me to the first one that caught my attention (for purely technical reasons), but soon after I started taking more and more notice of these seemingly universal and well-accepted statements about situations and behaviours. Now I’ve had time to absorb them and see how they apply in the real world, I wanted to call out some of my favourites and talk about my experiences with them. Overall, I don’t think you can pigeonhole any one person or situation with these, but by leveraging them as a collection of mental models you can start to understand the reasons behind someone’s thoughts or actions, even your own.
September 16, 2025
On GenAI Optimism
If you’ve been anywhere near the internet lately, you’ve probably noticed that Generative AI (GenAI) has gone from “that weird thing that makes creepy faces” to “the technology that’s apparently going to either save or destroy civilization.” But here’s what’s fascinating: depending on who you ask, you’ll get wildly different takes on what this technology actually is and what it means for our future. I’ve noticed something curious in conversations about AI. Those who work in machine learning tend to roll their eyes when business folks start waxing poetic about AI consciousness (“I for one welcome our new AGI overlords”), while those same business folks get frustrated when the ML crowd keeps saying “Well ackchyually… it’s just statistics!” Who’s right? Well, that’s where things get interesting.
September 9, 2025
Building an Infinite Canvas with Skia in React Native
Building an infinite canvas in React Native seems straightforward until you actually try to do it. You quickly run into performance issues, coordinate system headaches, and gesture conflicts that make you question your life choices. After spending way too much time figuring this out, here’s everything I learned about building a proper infinite canvas that actually works. Why React Native Skia? First, why not just use a ScrollView? Because ScrollView has fixed dimensions and doesn’t give you the fine-grained control you need for things like:
September 8, 2025
On Nonlinear Impact
Throughout my life I’ve met many different types of people, some content to lead a simple life, some striving for something more. A simple life, with family and friends, is absolutely a wonderful aspiration that can be fulfilling for many. There are however some who for some reason need to find meaning in something more than the simple life, who have a need to have “impact”, whatever that means for them. Having an impactful life is quite a nebulous and difficult to define aspiration, and what it means will be different for everyone. Does one define impact through community/public service; educating future generations and passing on learnings to help propel future generations forward; or through making scientific discoveries and inventing new things; or perhaps building businesses to give people jobs and help grow economies? Whatever the endeavour, for someone to have impact and achieve that “something more”, what this seems to translate to is having an outsized impact on the world around us, creating more for others than you consume for yourself. For this I use a mental model of Nonlinear Impact.
December 8, 2024