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.
Recognition-Primed Decisions: Expert Intuition Under Pressure
November 3, 2025
We’ve explored how systematic frameworks like PDCA and the nursing decision cycle enable structured decision-making even under pressure. But what happens when there’s no time for even the most compressed systematic process? When decisions must be made in seconds, not minutes, based on pattern recognition rather than deliberate analysis? A firefighter rushes into a burning building, assesses the si...
Fall Reading List 2025
October 31, 2025
Fall has been a season of decision-making and risk for me, both in what I’ve been reading and thinking about. Following up on my summer reading list, here’s what’s been on rotation this fall. Unlike the summer’s eclectic mix of fish history and F1 engineering, this season had an unintentional theme: how smart people think about uncertainty, probability, and building things that last. Thinking in B...
The Nursing Decision Cycle: Clinical Judgment Under Pressure
October 27, 2025
Throughout this series on decision making structures, we’ve explored how different industries approach high-stakes decision making under uncertainty. We’ve seen, for example, how PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) provides a systematic framework for continuous improvement in manufacturing and nuclear operations. But what happens when there’s no time for deliberate planning cycles? When decisions must be mad...
Joining Scale Venture Partners as Chief Data Scientist
October 20, 2025
I’m excited to share that I’ve joined Scale Venture Partners as Chief Data Scientist. After spending the last few years building AI/ML systems to extract insights from venture data at Aumni and JPMorgan Chase, I’m now working directly with a VC firm to embed those capabilities and more into their investment process. The Opportunity Scale operates in what we call the “messy middle” of venture: betw...
Keeks 0.3.0: Introducing the Merton Share Strategy
October 15, 2025
I’m excited to announce Keeks 0.3.0, which introduces a powerful new betting strategy based on Robert Merton’s portfolio optimization work. This release also adds the ability to calculate maximum entry prices for one-time gambles, complete with examples that explore the famous St. Petersburg paradox. What’s New The highlight of this release is the MertonShare strategy, which gives you explicit con...
What Two Failed Vibe Coding Projects Taught Me About AI Assistants
October 13, 2025
I built two projects over the past year or so that will probably never see production. Both consumed weeks of real time in agregagte and served as testing grounds for every new model and coding assistant that dropped in that time: Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, MCPs, the whole parade. While neither shipped, I learned more from these failures than from most of my successful projects. Having some kind ...
Building a Personal Prompt Library with MCP and Lexicon
October 10, 2025
I keep finding myself typing the same prompts over and over. “Run make lint and fix all issues.” “Do an audit and create contextswitch tickets for tech debt.” “Review this code and suggest improvements.” These aren’t one-off requests. They’re workflows I repeat constantly across different projects. And every time, I’m either retyping them from memory or hunting through chat history to copy-paste t...
Evergreen Gets Serious: Building Tools That Think With You
October 8, 2025
A month ago I built Evergreen, a personal CRM in Swift despite never having written Swift before. It worked well enough. I could track contacts, log interactions, and stay on top of follow-ups for the Atlanta AI dinners. But as I actually used it, I started noticing the gaps. The data model was too simple. I couldn’t capture enough detail about what I was doing or what needed doing. And while the ...
Angel Portfolio Cira 2021-2023 Update
October 6, 2025
A few years back, I was in a position to make some small angel investments through SPVs, writing checks into early-stage companies with clear tailwinds from major macro trends. As I wrote in my original angel investing post, I focused on businesses I could understand, early-stage deals with sane valuations, and founders with advantages that mattered. The thesis centered on companies positioned to ...
Keeping Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex on Track with ContextSwitch
October 3, 2025
Working with AI coding agents is great until you switch between tools. You spend an hour getting Claude Code set up with context, then a new great model comes out and you need to jump into Cursor to try it out, and suddenly you’re re-explaining the entire project plan. Again. The same happens when the projects get truly large and complex. For a toy project the internal agents’ project management t...
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