I've started writing again

A lot of you connected with me back when I was writing tech books. I stopped for a while and spent a good stretch building iOS apps instead, some for me , mostly for others. I’ve started writing again, a bit different than before, about something I didn’t expect to care this much about.

It’s a series of short essays called Becoming Gnarly . The name comes from both skateboarding and nature, and they point at the same thing. In skating, a trick is gnarly when it’s hard and a little dangerous, you commit anyway, and you carry the scars. The respect is in the risk. A tree grows gnarled for the same reason: it grew somewhere hard — wind, rock, a hundred seasons of not-quite-enough — and the gnarl is both the record of the struggle and the reason the wood is worth looking at. The essays are about choosing the harder path when it’s worth it, and the harder skill of telling which paths those are.

A lot of them circle AI, because that’s the strange hard thing in front of me right now: what it means to make things with it, where it genuinely helps, where it quietly takes the part you actually wanted to do yourself. I’m thinking out loud, in public, and trying to be honest about the parts I haven’t worked out.

Roughly weekly from here, with some quick bursts at the start while I figure things out. If that sounds like your kind of thing, the first one’s here: