The short version: teaching kids, building for community, learning guitar, writing the next part of my life out loud. Going mobile a lot this season — building from friends' places, coffee shops, wherever the day puts me.
Building this week
- This site is becoming the hub.I'm wiring my different repos and websites into one connected thing instead of disconnected pieces. One shared base that the others grow from, so when I see a problem I want to solve I can put something together in 30 minutes instead of rebuilding from scratch. The method lives at /method. The Tumaini concept piece stays on its own URL because it's a specific deliverable. Everything else is here.
- An ideas garden.I keep having ideas I want to sit with before I build them — things like a proximity chat for cars so drivers stuck in traffic could talk to each other like you do in a video game. I'm setting up a place where these seeds live and grow instead of getting lost.
- The teaching content. Filling out /teaching with what I actually do — the inclusive basketball program in Brooklyn, BeyondChess, the building I do for community, the Tops Diner moment that became Phonix.
- Phonix, with my partner.We're working on a community around building with understanding— the opposite of just shipping AI slop fast. The rule we're landing on: build the dumb throwaway version yourself first, then let AI help you fill it in. Skipping the struggle skips the understanding.
- Tanzania program application. A friend connected me to a woman running an education program in Tanzania. The resume is going out — chess and basketball coaching headline, CS background as proof underneath.status of application as of this week
Learning
- Guitar.The strum never stops — that's the rule. Warm up, then play. The rhythm of practice matters more than how long any single session is.
- Teaching itself. Specifically how to teach cross-domain — how to show a kid that basketball, chess, dance, and rhythm are all the same shape underneath. The kids are the ones teaching me whether the lesson actually carries.
- Building with AI without rotting.Where the line is between AI as a tool that helps you understand and AI as a tool that makes you faster at producing things you don't understand. The line is real. I'm trying to stay on the right side of it.
Teaching
- Sunday basketball. Inclusive youth program in Brooklyn, kids of all abilities playing together. Every Sunday.one specific Sunday moment from this week
- BeyondChess. Youth chess with the board as a starting point for teaching how to see patterns across fields.current cohort size + recent session detail
- Community builds. Whoever needs something — a website, an app, an AI tool — I build it for free and teach them how to do it themselves.
Thinking about
Capacity. The thing I keep coming back to is that different bodies have different maximum capacities — AI is at its best when it's being structural and precise, humans are at our best when we're being emotional and creative, and both can do either but each has a max. Phineas and Ferb is the cleanest picture of it: Phineas' max is the creative voice, Ferb's max is the technical execution, both are kids, both can do both, but each has a top end. I think a lot of what's coming next is figuring out which lane each body in a room is at its max in, and arranging things so each one gets to operate from there.
Also: every body is a kind of small spaceship moving around. We look at each other from inside our metal shells and forget the person in the next car has a life full of reasons. The proximity chat idea came from sitting in traffic and wondering why we can't talk to the person next to us when we could in a game.
Not doing
Not chasing money. Not building for monetization or scale as an end in itself. Not optimizing for the algorithm. Not saying yes to things just because someone's watching. Not pretending I have everything figured out — this page is going to keep changing because I keep changing.