Exploring Ideas: A Blog on Technology, Startups, Food, and More

Welcome to my blog where I share thoughts and insights on technology, startups, and life in Atlanta. Browse through the articles below or explore by topic.

Writing Job Postings That Actually Work: A Hiring Manager's Guide to Clear Communication

September 17, 2025

This is the second in a four-part series on analyzing job postings from different perspectives: as a candidate, as a hiring manager, as an HR partner, and as a competitive analyst. I learned to write job postings the hard way. I wrote them without a ton of care and got zero candidates, or a million, or had it rejected by someone wiser than me for breaking a rule I’d never heard of. After the turmo...

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Reading Between the Lines: How to Analyze Job Postings as a Candidate

September 15, 2025

This is the first in a four-part series on analyzing job postings from different perspectives: as a candidate, as a hiring manager, as an HR partner, and as a competitive analyst. I’ve spent years reading job postings from every possible angle. As a job seeker early in my career, as someone who’s written dozens of job descriptions, and as an investor or competitor trying to understand what compani...

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Smoked Chicken with Alabama White Sauce

September 12, 2025

Alabama white sauce is one of those regional barbecue gems that I think is wildly underrated but also I totally get why mayo based BBQ sauce hasn’t really caught on. It should though, it’s tangy, creamy, and cuts through rich smoked meat like nothing else. The sauce was invented at Big Bob Gibson’s in Decatur, Alabama back in 1925, and it’s been their signature ever since. Traditionally it’s serve...

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Two Ways: Grilled Marinated Wings

September 10, 2025

In Atlanta we have what we call fake fall. It’s late August or early September, and you’ve survived the worst of summer. College football is back, and maybe your team won. You’ve got your sweaters out, you’re ready. You get one glorious weekend of nice temperatures to lure you into comfort, and then you get wrecked by 2 more weeks of summer. Here’s a good thing to cook on your false fall weekend, ...

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The Internet Economy Battle Royale: When Bots Pay and Content Fights Back

September 8, 2025

Something fascinating is happening to the economic foundation of the internet. While we’ve been debating whether AI will take our jobs, a quieter battle has been raging over who gets paid when machines read our content. Recently, Coinbase announced x402, a protocol that lets AI agents pay for web resources directly over HTTP. Around the same time, Cloudflare rolled out more aggressive bot manageme...

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Vibe Coding a Personal CRM in Swift (Having Never Written Swift)

September 5, 2025

So I had a problem. The Atlanta AI dinner series was growing, and I was starting to lose track of who I’d met, what we’d talked about, and when I should follow up. I needed a CRM, but not the enterprise bloatware you’re thinking of. Just something simple, local, and private that could help me keep track of folks and keep this thing going. I could have probably used the free tier of a basic CRM. He...

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The Mensarius Oath: When Ancient Banking Meets Modern Ethics

September 3, 2025

I stumbled across something called “The Mensarius Oath” recently and pulled the string that led from ancient Roman banking to modern venture capital ethics. It’s a story about how we keep trying to solve the same fundamental problem: how do you make finance serve society instead of the other way around? The Original Mensarii Our story starts in ancient Rome, 352 BCE. The Republic is facing a debt ...

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Summer Reading List 2025

September 1, 2025

Summer’s winding down, and I’ve been fortunate to get through some excellent books over the past few months. I generally listen to audiobooks when riding bikes, doing long drives, or yard work. This summer I’ve been fortunate enough to do quite a bit of both, and have been able to enjoy some great books in the process. Here’s a quick rundown of what’s been on my reading list, along with why each o...

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Technical Debt in Engineering Management: The Hidden Costs of Quick Management Fixes

August 29, 2025

Consider a common scenario in startup management: an engineering team drowning in meetings prompts a simple fix: all decisions flow through a single manager. Problem solved! Fewer meetings, faster choices, everyone can focus on coding again. Six months later, that manager is working 70-hour weeks, has become a bottleneck for every product decision, and the team is frustrated that nothing can move ...

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Metrics That Actually Matter (And the Ones That Don't)

August 27, 2025

I saw a startup deck once and counted something like 47 different metrics across the slides. When I asked the founder which three numbers would tell them if the business was healthy or dying, they couldn’t answer clearly. They were measuring everything and understanding nothing. This is the curse of modern analytics: we can track anything, so we think we should track everything. But most metrics a...

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