About This Website
Me
I am a software developer and engineering manager living in NYC. From 2014-2024, I worked at Braze, where I managed a group of engineering teams. In a prior life, I worked as a policy analyst for the New York State Governor’s Office. And before that, I studied history and philosophy at Swarthmore College.
Web Presence
- I track the books that I read and want to read on Goodreads. See Books I Love for a list of favorites with brief commentary.
- Most of the code I write is available on Github.
Projects
- Zeke is a CLI that makes managing a folder of markdown notes more ergonomic. I use it for my own personal note taking system.
- DrDoom is a small script for learning and practicing the Doomsday Algorithm.
- Orbital was a web app for learning and practicing build orders and timings in real time strategy games. I wrote it for Braze’s 2018 hackday as a way to learn Elm. At its core, it is a timer that uses text-to-speech synthesis to read user-defined phrases aloud at specific timings. The effect is similar to having a coach remind you to take certain actions at specific times.
Uses This
Hardware
Starting with laptops, my daily driver is a 2022 M2 MacBook Air in Midnight Blue with 24GB of RAM. This is the best computer I have ever owned. It is sleek and thin and light. I love that I can go whole days without charging it and yet it is way faster than it has any right to be.
My phone is a Pixel 7. On the plus side, I like that it more or less runs stock Android and that the camera is pretty good. On the cons, I wish its fingerprint reader was better. Phone hardware is amazing, but does anyone actually use their phones in a way that pushes that hardware to its limits? I don’t, so I’m perfectly happy to stay a generation or two behind the latest flagships.
When I’m not reading on my phone, I read on a Kindle Paperwhite. And I listen to music and shelter from the sounds of the subway with a pair of Pixel Buds Pro.
While I am, by tradition and upbringing, a PC gamer, most of my gaming over the last few years has taken place from my couch, via a Nintendo Switch or (more recently) a Steam Deck.
I carry some of these things around in a Tom Bihn Synapse 25 backpack. I have used this bag for over a decade at this point, and really admire the simple but pragmatic design and excellent build quality.
Software
Firefox is my browser of choice. For add-ons, I run uBlock Origin, 1Password, and Raindrop.
For text editing, I use Neovim, and typically run that inside Alacritty + zsh + tmux.
My go to programming languages are Rust, Ruby, and JavaScript. I’ve worked a little bit with Go.
I use the same UNIX command line tools as the rest of the world, but a few exceptions are worth mention. ripgrep is a blazing fast replacement for grep, written in Rust. tldr is a simple alternative to man pages. fzf is a fuzzy finder which I use for path and shell history searching. bat is a cat replacement, but with line numbers and syntax highlighting. eza is an ls replacement with some nice features, like git integration and better colors.
I use Anki for technology-aided spaced repetition, which is the closest thing to a super power I have encountered, other than (maybe) modern contact lenses. My personal note taking system is just a folder, synced with Dropbox and managed with Zeke, which has a bunch of markdown files in it. I track other things in Todoist (todo lists…), Raindrop (bookmarks), YNAB (finances), and Cronometer (nutrition).
Other miscellany. Alfred and Rectangle are nice quality of life improvements for macOS. Little Snitch is a great network monitor. And there’s this lovely tea timer built by Michael Villar.
All of this software is installed and kept up to date via homebrew. I back everything up via Dropbox.
This Website
The motivating idea for this site is that it become a sort of garden that I will tend over time. Revising some parts, pruning others, grafting on new notes.
Less metaphorically, it is a perpetual draft. I am fascinated by human projects that take a long view, that unfold over the years, and that reward patience. My ambition is that this website can be such a project for myself.
Colophon
The core design principles of nwj.sh are that it should be simple, fast, and respectful of users’ privacy.
In keeping with those principles, the site is static HTML and CSS. It loads no JavaScript at all. I write all content in CommonMark Markdown and compile to HTML using Hugo. I use the TailwindCSS framework for styling. Hugo Pipes and PostCSS handle CSS minification and other asset compilation. A full revision history is in git (see this Github repo).
I host and deploy the site on Netlify. There is no user tracking code, though basic traffic analytics are available via Netlify’s server logs.