learnings
AI-assembled learning plans on niche topics — history, engineering, design, and wherever curiosity leads next. Each plan is built by a hand-crafted agentic pipeline: claims researched against sources, modules sequenced for how people actually learn. The curation and the questions are mine.
The Analog Writing Toolkit
A practical, research-grounded guide to handwriting, pens, ink, paper, journaling, and note-taking. Builds a mental model for picking gear and scripts, establishing a practice, and using writing as a thinking tool — rooted in cognitive science and cross-cultural craft.
From Architecture to Teams
How system structure and team structure co-design each other — a rigorous path through sociotechnical foundations, cognitive load, bounded rationality, Conway's Law, distributed cognition, affordances, DDD, Team Topologies, psychological safety, organisational learning, platform and enabling teams, and the politics of change.
Effective Prompt Engineering
Prompt engineering without the folklore. A practitioner's tour of what the evidence actually says about prompts — as specifications, as speech acts, as artifacts that fail under complexity and decay as models improve. Covers chain-of-thought, few-shot, persona, structured output, context engineering, systematic optimization (DSPy, MIPRO), empirical methodology, and the engineering judgment that holds it all together.
Learning How to Teach
Every instructional decision — sequence, pacing, feedback, assessment — encodes a claim about how people learn. Many of those claims are wrong, including ones that feel obviously true to learners and teachers alike. This curriculum works through what the evidence actually shows: the gap between what feels like learning and what is, the cognitive load limits that constrain every design, the assessment mechanisms that quietly determine what gets learned, and the organizational conditions without which good pedagogy can't survive first contact with the institution. Teaching well isn't a gift — it's applied learning science.
Perfectionism and Infinity in Art
How artists, philosophers, and mystics have wrestled with two impossible ideals — the perfect work and the infinite whole — from Plato's Forms through Kabbalah, Michelangelo's unfinished marbles, Escher's tessellations, Kusama's mirror rooms, Borges's libraries, and the quiet counter-tradition of wabi-sabi and satisficing.
A History of Europe
From prehistory to the present — how Europe was made, imagined, and contested, told through the lens of modern historiography.
Pros and Cons of AI
A well-rounded exploration of AI's benefits and risks — from productivity gains and healthcare breakthroughs to algorithmic bias, labor displacement, and environmental costs.
Understanding Climate Change
A comprehensive guide to climate science, policy, justice, and action — from tipping points and carbon pricing to migration, geoengineering, and the political forces shaping our response.
Graph Theory for Software Engineers
A practical introduction to graph theory — from fundamental concepts through traversal algorithms, cycle detection, topological sorting, and shortest path algorithms — designed for software engineers who need to reason about graph-structured data.
Java Deep Dive for Senior Engineers
A comprehensive guide to Java and the JVM for experienced engineers coming from Rust, Python, or TypeScript — covering runtime internals, type system, concurrency, modern features, and ecosystem.
Frontend for Backenders
A senior backend engineer's guide to modern frontend architecture: component models, reactivity, state management, build tooling, CSS, data contracts, auth, performance, testing, and server components.
Becoming Yourself
An 8-module journey through the psychology of identity — from self-concept and body signals to values, preferences, and living authentically in relationships.
Thinking in Film: A Mental Model for Gear Selection
A structured decision framework for choosing film cameras, lenses, stocks, and workflows. Builds the mental model so the right gear falls out of your constraints, not forum recommendations.
Feminism, Meninism, and a Century of Gender Dynamics
A structured overview of feminist movements, masculinity studies, gender identity, the manosphere, and performativity — tracing how gender politics evolved from suffrage to #MeToo and beyond.
Neurodivergence in Software Engineering
A practical guide for neurodivergent engineers — from understanding executive function and sensory processing to leveraging strengths, managing burnout, and building sustainable work practices.
Satisficing and the Art of Anti-Perfectionism
From bounded rationality to wabi-sabi, punk DIY to neuroscience — how 'good enough' unlocks creativity, decision-making, and well-being.
Practical Guide to Rules Engines
From Rete networks to JIT compilation — a hands-on guide to building, optimizing, and governing rule-based systems in Java.
Rationale Encoding in Practice
How to embed intent, purpose, and design rationale into systems through constraints, declarative policies, environmental traces, and documentation — and why it decays.
Safety in Sociotechnical Systems
How safety emerges from the interaction of people, technology, and organizations — from foundational theory through resilience engineering, safety culture, and practical investigation methods.
Local-First Data Architectures for Vue 3, Nuxt 4 and Postgres
A structured learning plan covering sync engines, CRDTs, client-side storage, authorization, and schema design for building local-first applications with Vue 3, Nuxt 4, and Postgres.
Sociotechnical Systems
From Tavistock coal mines to Wardley maps — how social and technical systems co-evolve, and what staff engineers can do about it
Composable vs Configurable Architecture
When to compose building blocks and when to expose configuration knobs — algebraic foundations, convention trade-offs, cognitive load, feature flags, drift, platform engineering, and monolith-to-microservices topology decisions.
Patterns in Art
A comprehensive exploration of geometric patterns across world art traditions — from the mathematics of symmetry and tessellation to the cultural meanings woven into textiles, tiles, and sacred forms.
Running Event Storming Workshops
A comprehensive guide to facilitating Event Storming workshops — from room setup and notation through facilitation, bounded context discovery, and scaling to the enterprise.
Philosophy for Software Engineers
Every engineering decision encodes philosophical commitments — about what exists, how we know things, what words mean, what we owe each other, and how wholes relate to parts. This curriculum makes those commitments visible, connecting major philosophical traditions to concrete engineering problems. Philosophy doesn't give you answers — it gives you better questions.
The Ainu: Indigenous People of Northern Japan
A comprehensive exploration of Ainu history, from Jomon origins and spiritual worldview through colonial dispossession under Japan and Russia, to the contemporary movement for rights and cultural revival.
Affordances for Engineers
A comprehensive guide to affordance theory applied to software engineering — from ecological psychology foundations through API design, architecture, team dynamics, and organizational culture, all from the engineer's perspective.