I make things
to figure out
how I'm doing.
Code by day, music by night, essays in between. I publish things I'd want to read myself: interactive, honest, and occasionally messy.
Visual essays about sound, attention, awareness, and code. Browser tools that explain how things work by letting you play with them. Music I record at home.
I care more about mentoring than teaching from a stage: one person, one real problem, close enough to help. If something here does that at a distance, that's enough.
Essays
Visual, interactive, a little personal.Who Owns the Bottom
Kick and bass fight because they are in the same critical band and the same twenty milliseconds. How to shape them so they stop, and why EQ is only half the answer.
What the Mmm Does
Chanting Om changes measurable things in the body. Almost none of them are the things people say, and the real mechanism is hiding in the least mystical part of the sound.
The Window at Three Kilohertz
Why Stevie Wonder sits on top of a dense arrangement without ever sounding pushed. A physical account of the band nobody plays in, and the voice that lives there.
The Back Button Is Not a Time Machine
It feels instant, and it feels like memory. It is neither: three unrelated systems agreeing by coincidence, and only one of them is yours to control.
The Shape of a Sound
Sine, square, triangle, sawtooth, noise: why each waveform sounds the way it does, and when to reach for which.
Borrowing Calm
What happens in your brain and body when anxiety takes over, and what actually helps.
What Music Knows About Emotion
Why some sounds make us feel happy and others make us feel sad.
One Task Is Enough
Why trying to do everything means doing nothing. The case for radical focus.
System Design Is Not a Crime
Frontend is a distributed system with an untrusted, unobservable replica on hardware you did not choose. A method for designing it well, and a way to tell that from just adding layers.
What Balanced Cables Actually Do
The trick behind XLR. Why two copies of the same signal beat one.
The Length of a Thought
A feeling has a physiological half-life of about ninety seconds. Rumination is the mechanism that keeps restarting the clock, and every restart lands a little harder.