Jimmy Hooker's RSS Feed

Building California School Trends

Tue, 24 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMT

We're trying to buy a house in one of the highest cost of living areas of the United States, and the schools aren't even good.

One thing we'd hear was "wealthier people are moving in who care about education, so this lower-performing school will improve". But was that true? How could we figure that out?

I ended up building California School Trends to solve for the problem.

Certain websites like Great Schools or Niche will show you their custom score, but it usually obfuscates the underlying fundamentals. Certain schools end up with a 7/10 that have top-decile test scores. Other schools with pretty mediocre test scores had a 9/10. Why? It was hard to tell. Were they trending up? Down? It was difficult to find out.

I ended up finding Page Turner, a non-profit that focuses on k-2nd grade reading proficiency. They had some pretty great stats, but only for reading proficiency, and it was a bit challenging to navigate their website.

Pre-AI I would maybe build some spreadsheets and manually put together some comparison. But since the updates in December 2025 with Claude and Codex, I felt like I had the opportunity to do something more interesting.

California test scores are administered through CAASPP, and all the data is public. I could build my own tool to make this easier to understand.

Initially I had just two problems I wanted to solve for:

I wanted to see if schools were improving or declining over the years
I wanted to easily compare neighborhood-by-neighborhood

As I started to dig into this and produce the website, a few other things came up:

I wanted it to be cheap and fast to host, everything heavily cached on Cloudflare
I realized it really bothered me to see so many underperforming schools, and I wanted to understand why

I decided I wanted to:

Use NextJS as the front-end framework
Use MapLibre + ProtoMaps on R2 heavily cached on Cloudflare
Normalize the CAASPP data into a SQLite database
Produce json for each school and district at build time from the SQLite db, so it could be cached

Design is still unsolved by AI imo, so I designed everything in Figma, largely produced the front-end components via Pencil.dev, and built the thing out. Even though AI solved for an enormous amount of work on this project, it still took a ton of time to complete the site. I spent effectively all my free time for approximately 2 months to complete the site.

While building it, I learned a bit about why schools underperform, especially for reading. And, surprisingly, some districts and states had solved for it. In Mississippi, they went from 49th in the nation for 4th grade reading, to the top 10. For low-income students, they are now considered #1 in the country. Their surrounding states have noticed, and both Alabama and Louisiana have reproduced their results. Marietta, GA has dramatically improved. Most people now call this phenomenon the "Mississippi Miracle".

So how do we do it? Well, Palo Alto Unified has shown us the way for California. While it might seem that PAUSD is at the top of the game (and in many ways they are), they were not succeeding with low-income students. Todd Collins, the former President of the school board, decided to make this their core focus. They reproduced the key features of the Mississippi Miracle, and saw low-income students proficiency jump almost 30 percentage points over the next 3 years.

So, now I'm motivated. This appears solvable, people have done this before. How do we get our school boards to do this? One thing I learned by working with the GrowSF team is that most people do not email their electeds. So, when most politicians get a bunch of emails, it is:

Very surprising
Very motivating

If it's so motivating and effective, why don't more people email? Well, there are a few problems you confront when you want to solve a problem in your local government.

Who do I email?
What do I write?
What is my ask? What do I want them to do? By when?

Most people are:

Bad writers
Not going to search for politicians email addresses
Pretty cynical about getting politicians to do things
Not highly motivated

And people are busy! They elected these people so they didn't have to think about these problems.

So, maybe I can utilize this site to make it easier for people to email their board and get them to focus on this problem with a template email.

Now we've gotta solve two final problems:

We've gotta get accurate board data, like name, title, and email
We've gotta write a good email template and make it frictionless for people to send

The second seems pretty straight foward. The first means we've gotta scrape non-deterministic website data from the funkiest district websites you've ever seen. URL structures that make no sense, board member pages who's layout would make the most hardened developer wince, so much unnecessary javascript. Even just finding the district website is a challenge.

I'm not quite finished with this, I've got the top 200 or so districts, but I'm pretty proud of the website.

We have a map to navigate schools near you, where you can color by reading scores, math scores, or by the average of the two. We have detailed district details including board contact information. We have detailed sub-group performance over time. It makes it dramatically easier to understand your school, and if you feel so motivated, to email your board to promote reading proficiency as a goal.

This was a ton of fun, both because it was a really big project that I feel is really important, and one that would have felt either impossible or would've taken way, way too much time pre-AI.

Check it out for yourself!

https://caschooltrends.com/

The unreasonable effectiveness of QR Codes for local politics

Fri, 05 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Many local politicians are elected by razor thin margins of hundreds of votes or less. This means you don't need a huge number of people to contact a politician to get their attention and influence their decision making.

One of my biggest realizations from working with GrowSF a few years ago was that creating a voting block that politicians want to appeal to is the key way to create change. You as one person aren't super interesting, but if you can create a decent sized group that is focused on a particular issue, suddenly a politician might really want your group's endorsement for the next election.

So, let's say you want something to change locally. Maybe an ordinance, or you want to improve the playground, or you want some flashing lights for your crosswalk to keep your kids safe. How do you get people to tell a politician that they want something and form your group?

Most people are:

Bad writers
Not going to search for politicians email addresses
Pretty cynical about getting politicians to do things
Not highly motivated

So how do you solve for these problems?

My tool of choice is QR Code signs.

QR Code Signs have the following benefits:

They are hyper-local, can be put right where the problem exists (motivation)
Can load an email template right from a person's phone (no one has to write)
Can load the email addresses that you want it sent to (no one has to look up their politicians email)
Extremely low friction (just use your camera, overcomes cynicism)

If your issue is popular with the locals, I promise your issue will get attention.

So, how do we do this?

Guide

Write your email in a Google Doc. Proofread it. Get a friend or loved one to look it over. Send it to yourself. Make sure there's no grammar issues, clearly lays out the problem you want solved, and your expectation that they solve it.
Find your local politicians email addresses. If the police would be useful, find the police chief's email. Consider whether or not the county has jurisdiction.
Create a custom email to track who sends them, like localhelper@gmail.com
Take the contents of the email, and the email addresses you collected, and paste it into the to:, subject, and message fields of this tool and generate a mailto: https://mailtolinkgenerator.com/ - make sure to include your helper email in the to: field so you can track who actually sends the email (this is important to know if what you're doing is working, if you need to adjust messaging, etc)
Generate a tinyurl and QRCode by pasting the contents of the mailto into the long url field: https://tinyurl.com/
Create a flyer, you can use this Google Doc as a template
Print it out and test it. Hold your phone up, send an email. Make sure it looks good.
Hang them up!

These genuinely work!

I've gotten an ordinance passed and over 100 emails sent using this method. I also have an active group that I can appeal to for other future issues I might care about.

The beauty of this method is that you are getting real people to reach out to politicians for something they care about, in the moment they care about it. Normal people usually can't be bothered, so you are getting normal people involved in the political process, a rare thing! And it will make you feel better that you are helping improve your community by making it easier for constituents to reach out with real concerns.

Be judicious about using this method, if there are QR Codes everywhere people will just start to ignore them. But it's a very useful method for accomplishing specific goals!

Our favorite kids books

Thu, 04 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

When we first started reading to our daughter I realized we had no idea what the ‘good’ books were. I asked some friends what their favorite books were, which was useful for a handful of books, but we quickly realized that:

You get bored reading the same book over and over
There are a lot of bad children’s books

At my local library you can borrow up to 80 items at a time, and books auto-renew up to some amount of times. So we generally will go and borrow about 40 books in a go. This looks somewhat ridiculous but we are not picky about them and will usually quickly scan a book and put it in the pile if it seems decent. This often leads to some great surprises.

Classics

The Lorax: I am a bit put off by the agenda here, which is a kind of anti-capitalist pro-environment thing, but the story is really well told and illustrated. My daughter also loves the Once-ler.
How the Grinch Stole Christmas!: My Daughter loved this so much that she memorized the entire book when she was almost 3. I had no idea she was doing this, and when she recited a huge chunk of it for the first time I cried from astonishment.
One Morning in Maine: Feels like it harkens back to an earlier era, almost meditative. Beautifully illustrated.
Frog And Toad Are Friends: I don’t think I ever read this as a kid and I absolutely love this. It is like two perfectly articulated personality archetypes that are so common to find in life. It doesn’t feel like it’s forcing some lesson on you. It’s just two very different friends hanging out.
Aesops Fables: There’s a version of this with really incredible illustrations on Amazon. It is over my kid’s head and some of the lessons are from another time, but she loves it.
The Night Kitchen: Feels like reading a dream, which I suppose it is.
Outside Over There: Truly bizarre. We’ve had friends read this to mess with them and they almost to a person find it extremely off-putting, which my daughter thinks is hilarious.
Where The Wild Things Are: A classic, fun to do voices for.
Polar Express: There’s a reason this is a classic. About Santa and the experience of belief. Very good.
Everyone Poops: Great when doing potty training. Really simple, and literally shows animals and humans pooping. Pretty funny.
What Do People Do All Day: This is almost like a celebration of capitalism and work. Maybe one of the rarest things to find in children’s books.
Goodnight Moon: Basically a poem. I didn’t love this and thought it was a bit boring at first. Now that I’ve read it upwards of a hundred times, I really appreciate its simple, quiet beauty.
Strega Nona: Kind of an insane story about a witch who can make pasta and her little helper.
The Story of Ferdinand: About a gentle bull in Spain. We lived in Granada for a couple years and this book is so beautifully illustrated that I feel transported back.
Eloise: Kind of like ‘Uncut Gems’ but for kids. Like an ADHD run-on sentence in book form. Pretty fun classic.
The Cat At Night: I love how it explores the world of a cat through the use of color and darkness in the pages.

Modern Stuff

Olivia: Really great. Basically just about a piglet named Olivia, which seems modeled on the author’s daughter.
I Want My Hat Back: Great for voices. Unexpectedly violent in a quiet way that I am a bit surprised a modern author got over the line. Same author does a great rendition of the Billy Goats Gruff.
The Fate of Fausto: I was pretty struck by how beautifully illustrated and paced this story is. The ending is also surprisingly violent for a modern author.
Hungry Jim: About a boy who wakes up as a Lion and eats the whole town. An overt homage to Maurice Sendak.
Bug Girl: About a girl who gets bullied for liking bugs. This book single-handedly resolved all my daughter’s fears about bugs and made it so she excitedly picks up dead bees and other bugs.
Grumpy Monkey: Really great faces/illustration, the page where he gets really sad is so exquisitely done that his expression is seared into my memory. Story is great. Deserves the praise it gets.
A Mouthful of Minnows: About a snapping turtle who realizes he’s going to wipe out the entire bloodline of the food he wants to eat and gets second thoughts. Really funny.
The Princess and the Pony: By Kate Beaton, who wrote ‘Hark a Vagrant’, one of my top web comics of all time. A simple, fun book.
The Story Orchestra: The story here is pretty secondary, to be honest. It’s basically about Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, it allows kids to play the music in a narrative context. Made me appreciate Vivaldi more.
Rosie Revere, Engineer: I have somewhat mixed feelings about this one. It is just so clearly agenda-driven that it’s a little obnoxious. The whole series is like this. But it is nicely illustrated and the rhythm of the story is fun.
The Last Peach: Really fun to do voices for. Effectively a couple bugs talking about eating peach for a whole book.
Little Blue Truck: Solid rhyming. I do my most stereotypical southerner voice for this and it is pretty fun to read.
The Gruffalo: Illustration is kind of mediocre, but the pacing and silliness make it pretty solid.
Stop Feeding’ Da Boids!: This lady in NYC just can’t stop feeding the pigeons. Fun to do voices.
Stuck: About a kid who keeps throwing more and more ludicrous things into a tree to free up his kite.
This Moose Belongs to Me: Another one from Oliver Jeffers. About a kid who claims a moose as his own. Beautiful illustration and pacing.
Chikka Chikka Boom Boom: Very silly alphabet book. I do it in a crazy voice and it just flows in a really fun way.
Quiet! by Céline Claire: Has almost no reviews online, which feels crazy to me. One of our favorites, about a cranky guy who is pissed about the noise of living in the city (I believe Paris is the setting of the story). Very fun just shouting QUIET! while reading.
In a Jar: Very beautifully illustrated. A nice warm hug of a book about bottling up experiences.

Will probably make you uncontrollably cry:

The Phone Booth in Mr. Hirota’s Garden: Effectively unknown, we picked this up randomly off the shelf. It’s about the 2011 tsunami in Japan. I was destroyed by this.
Grandpa’s Top Threes: Criminally ignored, there are just 3 reviews about it on Amazon. I dunno how to explain this without ruining it. Very good.
Love You Forever: This has become a well-known classic about a mother’s love for her son. It will rug pull you and you will cry in front of your children. My daughter loved us reading it because she found us crying at it to be fascinating.

How to Not Be Full of it as a Product Manager

Fri, 03 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT

So you’ve joined a new team, company, etc and you are experiencing the cold terror that is your new responsibility area as a product manager.

I think you have about 90 days to demonstrate that you are going to be a net positive addition to the team and to build up trust. What do you do?

This assumes:

The product already exists
There are existing users

My opinion on this is you need to:

Get ahold of as many customers as possible within the next 30 days and have them walk you through their product usage and your product feature in particular. Have them share their screen while they do this. Write out your questions loosely beforehand, and adjust rapidly with the first few customers until you get a feel for which questions elicit the best answers. Record everything, and then tag key statements around pain points, etc, with a tool like Dovetail.
Insist on involving the engineering manager and designer associated with your product area in the customer discussions. This has multiple benefits, including demonstrating your ability to understand customer pain points and developing shared context between your key stakeholders.
Learn where all the bodies are buried in the data. Do not rely on the data team, you need to get familiar with querying raw data. Know the key tables and how to produce good output.
Manage your stress. Exercise, take supplements, and sleep enough that you don’t freak out. If you are doing this right, the first 90-days should feel like watching ‘Uncut Gems’ nonstop. Act accordingly.
Ignore everything that is not the above. No one will really care that you followed whatever process/ritual properly if your product area doesn’t deliver. Let people chase you down and yell at you for things that aren’t really consequential. You need to hold your responsibility to your product area above all else. That doesn’t mean you need to be unnecessarily rude or obnoxious, but it’s ok to drop balls that don’t matter.

That’s it. I think the last point is worth really worth emphasizing. It’s really easy to get caught up in exercises that feel useful but don’t solve real problems. Do not be the person who has nice narratives but isn’t driving value. Understand your product area through customers, include your key stakeholders, build an aligned plan, and articulate it to leadership. That is all that matters.

Best of luck!

How to Deliver Good Presentations

Tue, 26 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT

This is actually pretty simple to do well, but you really have to put in the practice time. Don't kid yourself, it is humiliating to fuck up a presentation because you didn't practice enough. Unforced Error. Here's how to do it.

Do an ‘off the cuff’ version with no slides, or minimal slides.
Experience the visceral terror of how bad the presentation will be if you do it ‘off the cuff’ or unpracticed.
Do it a couple more times to really fire up the ‘presentation’ neurons
Write down what you want to say like it was a speech, literally word for word what you want to say to the audience.
Practice the written down version a couple times
Edit it heavily
Practice 5-10 more times, making little adjustments, until you can mostly do it without looking at your text

Voila. Your presentation will most likely not suck, and you will have a confident handle on the material so that you can dynamically deliver it in front of an audience with a relative sense of comfort.

Strategies for dealing with Anxiety and Stress

Sat, 23 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT

I have experienced anxiety my whole life, at times to degrees that made it really difficult to just have normal, every day interactions. However, I’ve always simultaneously pushed myself really, really hard. Which meant I had to develop coping strategies to survive. Here’s what worked.

Supplements

Zembrin: Basically calm, energized focus in a pill. No side effects that I’ve seen. Remarkable supplement. If you have trouble with focus and energy, try this first.
L-Theanine: Gits rid of the jitters from caffeine. Naturally occurring in Green Tea, if you are sensitive to the effects of caffeine it basically gives you all the good without the bad. Completely changed coffee for me.
Lavender Pills: Noticeably calmer but not so much that it feels like a hindrance or produces side-effects. Pleasantly calm.
Magnesium Citrate: Useful to go to sleep, just be careful to not take too much. It is a diarrhetic and will give you wild gas if you over do it.

Medications

Beta Blockers: Great if you experience situational anxiety so intense that there’s no real “takeaways” or learning from the experience. Very useful for things like interviews where it’s harder to get “at bats” and the stakes are high. The key feature is it makes it so your anxiety/fear doesn’t produce physical side-effects, like shakey or sweaty hands, rapid heart rate, twitching, etc. It’s non-addictive and isn’t mind altering, but beware that it keeps heart rate down so you can’t exercise on it (your heart rate won’t keep up with the exercise). The cool thing is you still experience the fear, but it is more thrilling because of the lake of physical stuff.

Exercise / Sleep

Intense Exercise: I ride my bike up hills so steep they cause me to lose feeling in my fingers, and I feel incredible, almost euphoric afterward. I have related this to others, and almost everyone who does some form of exercise that is so intense they can’t think during parts of it remarks the same thing. You just feel great afterward. Doesn’t need to take a long time, 20 minutes of exercise that includes 5 minutes of super high intensity is great. I like biking because I get to see cool stuff while I’m doing it, and see way more than other exercise, but do whatever you like. If you like it, you’ll do it more often.
Minimum strength training: I can do about 50 push-ups in a single set along with 50 squats at the age of 40. I never do more than 1 set of these in a day. I know very few people who can do this at any age, much less 40. The trick is that you never push yourself too hard. Make it easy, and keep it easy. It takes very little of my time and it makes my body feel great.
Get an amount of sleep that makes you feel good. This really varies from person to person. I usually only let myself get 7 hours minimum, but I probably could use 9. My wife gets 9 and feels great. I wish I could discipline myself to do this, I think it’s probably the next big unlock for me.

Meditation

Ana Pana aka breath meditation/focus: This is what you do for the first 3 days of a 10-day sit when doing a Goenka-style Vipassana. Just focus on the breath leaving/entering your nose. Pay attention to everything about it, go ‘deep’ on your attention, notice the humidity, the sensation, how one nostril is closed, the quality of the breath. See how long you can focus before your mind wanders. 1 minute is a big achievement here. Quick, Goenka-led 15-minute version.
Vipassana aka “body scanning”: Start at the top of your head, and slowly move down your body, focusing on the sensation on your skin. If you are doing this right (ie with the right level of focus), you can usually feel your body releasing tension while you’re doing it. This can be hard to do well without getting good at Ana Pana first.

Little Cheats

Box Breathing: 4 seconds breathe in, 4 seconds hold, 4 seconds breathe out, 4 seconds hold. Repeat. Has a noticeable calming effect. Do this for a couple minutes and you can quickly center.
Cold Showers: Aka Wim Hoff showers. The cheat here is to take a hot shower, and then at the end switch to cold. It’s a great systemic wake up, see how long you can do it!

Psychology

Talking to yourself/coaching yourself: You can talk to yourself in a friendly way, as if you are coaching a friend. E.g. “Let’s not think about that right now, we can think about it later. It’s time to go to sleep, let’s go to sleep”. “It’s time to focus, we need to focus on this and get it done. Let’s focus on this task really hard”. “Tonight when we sleep let’s really clear the brain, we don’t need to repair physically as much.” It is kind of insane how well this works.
Reframing: The kids probably call this ‘cope’ now, but reframing is a key psychological device. Cope is useful to survive! If you have a shitty experience, there can be a tendency to just focus on the negative, but that’s actually an inaccurate way to view experience. Almost all experience has upside. Focus on it! What was good about it? Articulate it, write it down, feel the goodness of it. A lot of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is oriented around this. It’s basically positive self-talk within a framework.
Becoming your own friend: I’m gonna work on a whole post on this, but learning to like yourself is the ultimate unlock and basically solves for most everything else. Just like you root for your friends, love your friends, and give them good advice, you gotta root for yourself, love yourself, and give yourself good advice. This is a consistent practice, and if your default is to be mean to yourself, either emotionally or verbally, it takes practice. I’m no where near done yet, but just the little bit I’ve done has dramatically helped.
Stop trying to be other people: You are yourself, that’s really all you can be. Learn to be the best version of that shamelessly. Trust your judgement of what this means. You will never be able to compete against people who are enjoying the experience of being themselves and doing what they’re doing. They will crush you. Just like you will crush others when you learn to do what you like and yourself.

Appendix:

Debugging Tartine Bread

Wed, 13 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Recipe for the uninitiated: Tartine Country Loaf. The book is more detailed.

I used to live 2 blocks from Tartine in the Mission of SF. A year ago we moved to the East Bay to seek a more, let's say, conducive atmosphere for our daughter to grow up in. But I missed having easy access to good bread! That is what got me started down this dark path.

I gotta say, this journey has been rough. Many times I would think I'd figured it out, only to then have a bad loaf and not understand what I did wrong. Things just seemed highly unpredictable. I watched tons of YouTube, read this forum, read the Sourdough Journey, the Bread Code, the Tartine book, Flour Water Salt Yeast, you get it. There was a lot of frustration, but I am an obsessive person by nature and I couldn't stop trying to figure it out. At one point I was baking 3 batches a week to speed up my understanding of what was/wasn't working. I've easily baked > 100 batches in the last year.

A lot of advice was really hard to parse. I texted with an award-winning baker in Berkeley and tried to get help on internet forums (including this one), but it was really hard to figure out which variables were off or which piece of advice was right. Was it my starter? Was it my bulk fermentation time? Was the levain just not active enough when I started the dough? Was I just too rough with shaping? Changing one thing seemed to have an effect, but then it would stop for some reason, and I wasn't sure whether to keep the change, revert the change, or change it again.

I've finally been able to consistently produce that bottom loaf. No bad loaves anymore. And these two things nailed it for me:

Using way more than the recommended amount of starter in the levain. Like, 30-45 grams of starter. I think this is the true key that unlocked way better loaves. If you remember anything from this, it's to just use more starter in your levain!
Starting with 98-100 degree water for bulk fermentation (our house is about 70 degrees). Because the levain was at ~70 degrees, it would bring water temp down a ton when mixed in. Then, fermantalyse inside the mixing bowl would bring the temp down even more.

Just those two things have made it so I get a consistent loaf in 3.5 to 4.5 hours of bulk fermentation.

Things that didn't work:

Letting bulk fermentation go on much longer, like 6-8 hours (since I was getting underfermented loaves). For some reason this just produced weird loaves that would exhibit characteristics of under fermentation (caverns), but would also be impossible to work with like an over fermented loaf (ie the gluten had broken down and they were weirdly sticky and wet)
Feeding my starter every 12 hours (or more). This just sucked, was a huge hassle, felt wasteful, and didn't meaningfully matter in my experience. Goal was to get it super active, and I guess that worked, but it was so much overhead. Super annoying.
Doing it by hand instead of using a KitchenAid mixer. I got some advice that maybe this was breaking down the gluten formation too much after fermantalyse. Didn't seem to matter, that said I got in the habit of doing it by hand after fermantalyse because of that debugging journey.
Being super gentle with the dough, especially toward the end of bulk fermentation and shaping. I actually can't say this did nothing, but the loaves were so inconsistent that this was like the equivalent of buying $300 running shoes when you just took up the hobby. It's not what's going to really move the needle at that level.

In hindsight, I think some of the variability I was getting was due to a combination of starter activeness and the amount of starter I was mixing into the leavin. I just had no idea those were the key things. I also, especially in the beginning, just used a 'tablespoon', as described in the book. But, I wasn't careful about measuring that out and I assume would get 'lucky' occasionally when putting in more starter and get a better loaf.

Otherwise, I pretty much stick to the recipe as described. Here is what I do:

Starter Maintenance:

House is ~70 degrees Fahrenheit.
50g water, 50g 1:1 bread flour/wheat flour combo every 24 hours, always feed in the morning. Dump everything but 2 or so tablespoons of starter, maybe 30g.

Making Levain:

Mix 30-45g of starter (depending on how active it seems to be) with 200g 1:1 bread flour/wheat mixture and 200g of 78-80 degree water.
Wait 12 hours

Making dough:

Turn the oven light on (this brings the oven temp up to around 83-84 degrees, which is a nice temp to bulk ferment at).
Mix levain and flour/water in KitchenAid stand mixer. Use 98-102 degree water. Mix for a couple minutes on setting 2.
Wait 30 minutes for fermantalyse to happen.
Mix in 20g of Salt with 50g of 90-100 degree water (this seems to matter less, I've used 82 degree water and it was fine, but you're just looking to maintain temp). I now use my hands, but I'm pretty confident you could use a stand mixer with a dough hook with no ill results.
At this point the dough is often around 82 degrees, maybe 84. In my experience it will keep dropping.
Put the dough in a Cambro container, then put it in the warm oven to maintain temp
Do the stretch & folds like normal every 30 minutes
After 3.5 to 4.5 hours, it should be doming. On the Cambro, sometimes the dough will show as being at or above the 2 liter line, but not always. As long as it's doming, it seems good in my experience.
Shape into rounds, wait 30 min
Shape into loaves and drop into bannetons.

Overnight Retard:

I throw a tea towel over top the bannetons and toss in the fridge for what usually ends up being ~17 hours (I start the dough process in the morning and end by around 3pm). I've also used saran wrap to not develop a 'skin', but the effects of this don't seem meaningful to me. I often bake one loaf, then wait another 2 days to bake the other one. It's still great! The fridge seems to do more than slow it down, it seems to basically stop fermentation in my experience. Maybe my fridge is on the colder side.

Baking:

Place a cookie sheet in the bottom rack to prevent the bottom of the dutch oven from getting too hot and burning the loaf
Set oven to 500 and wait for it to get to temp
Pull out the dutch oven, rice flour the bottom and toss in the loaf direct from the fridge. The coldness of the loaf makes no difference in my experience to letting it sit out while the oven pre-heats. It's also easier to cut with a razer when it's cold.
Score the loaf at a 45 degree angle to get that nice lip
Bring oven temp to 470 and bake for 20 minutes lid on
Take lid off dutch oven and bake for another 30 minutes

I hope this helps someone who was as frustrated as I was, and helps them get a bit less lost. Just use more starter in your levain!

Being Grateful

Thu, 24 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT

I think I've been trying to figure out myself and my relationship to the world since I was about 17. About 20 years of introspection. That's... maybe too much.

I think some people are more or less addicted to "therapy" and "healing"

developing real goals, even very simple goals, probably helps people move on better than many systematized approaches bc those systems (therapy) are more interested in perpetuating themselves https://t.co/CYMOsFuE9e
— Simon Sarris (@simonsarris) March 28, 2022

I got into spiritual stuff when I was pretty young because I was deeply anxious and it impeded a lot of what I wanted to do and how I interacted with people. Some of this had to do with my parents, but some was probably built in. I thought if I figured myself out, I could finally live as my true self without anxiety. But it never really worked out, despite throwing a lot of weaponry at it, including therapy, intensive meditation, supplements, exercise, and more. Those things helped, but it usually felt like I was dealing with symptoms rather than the core of the thing.

There are a number of studies that extol the virtues of gratitude. Start a gratitude journal! It will make you notably happier! But that always felt like work to me. It made gratitude into a job, and so, even after trying many times, I tended to avoid it. I didn't disagree with the ideas, whenever I stepped back I realized my life was really pretty great. I just couldn't make it a consistent habit.

But one thing I've done recently has changed this. Pretty dramatically in my experience.

I spend a lot of time being critical. I'd go so far as to say 999 out of a 1000 thoughts are critical. I am constantly noticing things that are out of place, that could be improved, that are bad, that are dumb. This is hugely useful in a working context, it makes you detail oriented and motivated to improve things. But if you can't shut that voice off, it becomes overwhelming and exhausting, coloring your whole experience. If you are almost only noticing the bad things, life seems... pretty bad!

But how do you change the ratio? How do you get to, let's be optimistic, and say, 5% grateful/positive thoughts? 5 thoughts out of 100.

In the past, I would try and convince myself that life was good. But it felt fake. I was already convinced that things were shit, so saying things like "life is amazing" felt false. Like I was a bad salesman trying to pitch an unimpressed customer.

But a recent realization has changed this. You just have to go to the extreme, foundational basics. You have to get down to the sensory experience. Breathing is... cool actually?

Stay with me.

Right now, you are alive. The fact that you are alive is remarkable, actually. Feel your hands, notice the sensations surrounding them. The air as it touches them, their place in space. You are currently operating a body that is an incredible machine. You are the god of a kingdom of specialized cells, waiting to navigate you around earth. Notice your environment. How cool is it that you are here? It is objectively interesting that you exist in this space, right now.

If you can follow this, and legitimately appreciate it, you can re-center yourself in any moment. Any moment you feel overwhelmed or anxious, you can bring it back to the incredible-ness of existence, and build on that. Suddenly, the fact that you are in this stressful meeting with the CEO is really, really cool. It's not a scary thing, it's a remarkable experience.

Any time I catch myself feeling tense or tight, I realize that I'm caught up in some dumb thought process that is highly critical. I come back to how cool it is that I'm here, and then that I'm having whatever experience I'm having. And, man, I am super grateful.

I'm really lucky.

Best of luck changing the ratio, and Happy Thanksgiving!

Listening to your Inner Voice

Fri, 24 Jun 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Recently I learned about mimetic desire, originated by Rene Girard, but perhaps popularized in tech by Peter Thiel who saw him as his philosophical mentor.

The TL;DR of mimetic desire is that almost all of our behavior is based on imitation of others, and that it's inescapable. You want that nice car because other people see that nice car as valuable and that the larger culture has built up expectations around this object, not necessarily out of some pure desire on your part to have it. Same with prestigious jobs, schools, excess money, fancy clothes, etc.

If you're in business, as Thiel points out, you could base the customers you go after, and the product decisions you make, on your competitors instead of solving for the deeper problems you might focus on if you made more customer-aware, focused decisions that were divorced from considering your competitors.

I have struggled my whole life with mimetic desire. Instead of understanding the things that I myself want to do, I base a lot of decision making on those around me. What is the smart decision, based on what others would think? What should I be doing with my time? What would impress people?

The key problem with this, and something I've found myself thinking about for many years, is that you end up without any of your own opinions.

It's easy to see why we ended up this way. Human's are tribal creatures with sophisticated social hierarchies that have a dramatic impact on health and survival. In the past, if you were ostracized from the group, it could mean certain death. So it makes sense that our brains evolved to care a great deal about what others think of us.

But, we live in a modern age! For those of us in America, we have more freedom, wealth, and independence than any civilization in history. One of the more difficult things about our age is the sheer quantity of choices we can make about our future, and the impossibility of choosing the 'right' one.

A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week. — General George Patton

A difficult truth to accept is that it's often better to make a bad decision than no decision. We want to be able to look back at our thinking and have it be thoughtful, defensible, clear, articulate, and well supported. But, most decisions are reversible! It's often better to 'find out' than to spend endless amounts of time hand-wringing, researching, etc.

I work in product management, but I've also been on the pure creation side as well. I often think of product management as a debug for bad intuition, helping make sure that what you are building is actually something people want vs something you assume people want. You talk to customers, do the research, and build up a sense of what will actually work that is well supported.

However, after a while, you build up tacit knowledge. Knowledge that largely feels like instinct, as it's been built into muscle memory. You can't entirely explain why you know a decision is right, but you know. It's been born through experience.

A few years ago I left a job at a bootstrapped, scrappy startup called Badger Maps to join the professionalized product management world. This threw a lot of my opinions and assumptions into doubt. Did my work at Badger translate? Was the tacit knowledge that I built up over time useful in another context?

I had to revalidate a lot of my thinking and reassess the way I did things. This made trusting my tacit knowledge difficult, and not trusting your gut can lead to bad decisions, plenty of which I made.

As Thiel highlights from Gerards work, imitation is inescapable, but it's possible to be aware of it and double-check yourself.

After considering everyone else's opinions, what do you still want to do? What still feels right? Check in with yourself! Don't do the thing you don't want to do! Ask yourself: "What do I actually want to do?".

How to Not Be Cynical

Fri, 10 Jun 2022 00:00:00 GMT

I was watching YouTube and I ran into this remarkable interview:

Ruby is incredible. It's clear that she is just a force of nature. She exudes life at the age of 87, and as 'limber as a dishrag', she just seems invigorated.

I've often been accused of being overly critical. I like to think I am, on the overall, a pretty optimistic person. I feel like most problems are solvable and that life is getting better and better. This period of time is, imo, one of the most exciting to be alive.

On the one hand, my critical nature has given me an eye for details and a high bar that I set for myself. On the other, I do worry that my critical nature can often bleed into and tinge experiences that could otherwise be really pleasant and enjoyable. It's very much so a double-edged sword.

My wife Sara is much more even keeled. She has a balanced nature, is generally happy, and often brings joy to those who spend time in her company. She balances me, and often makes me realize that I need to chill a little bit. Maybe enjoy the short time we have here.

You only get to be alive for a brief interval. Maybe 4000 weeks if you're lucky.

Try to enjoy it!
— Nat Friedman (@natfriedman) November 1, 2021

I want to write about this a bit more, but @visakanv and @nickcammarata have been some of my favorite follows more recently because of their incredible focus on positivity in a way that feels legible to me. Visa often encourages frame changes, while Nick focuses on meditation and qualia.

Can you be critical without being cynical? Without becoming overly judgmental?

It feels like a difficult tight rope to walk.

Life is amazing! It's incredible we get this opportunity!

I hope I don't waste too much of it focusing on the wrong things.

Art Diario - The most complicated thing I've built

Sun, 12 Sep 2021 00:00:00 GMT

TL;DR - You should download my simple little app that I have poured an insane amount of effort into making. Please only tell me that you love it, but also report bugs!

About two years ago I started Lambda School part time. While I'd always been a technical kid, I never was able to dedicate the time to fill in the gaps of my programming knowledge. I could hack things together, but I lacked the ability to create cohesive CRUD apps. Anything beyond simple functions was way too much for me. I barely understood what an array was. Lambda School was the first time I could commit to learning programming without quitting my day job, and I jumped at the opportunity.

There's a lot more to this story, and I want to write about it in more depth, but the long and short is that, while brutal, it worked, and I now know how to program in a lot more depth.

A while back I stumbled on an app called ArtPip. It had this core idea of showing everyone who had the app the same piece of art per day. I loved it. I loved being exposed to art that I would have never otherwise seen, I loved how it lasted for 24 hours, and I loved that it was a shared experience with everyone who had the app. Unfortunately, the engineer building it wasn't able to continue, and eventually the app itself switched over to photographs instead of paintings. Photographs are great, but they're an entirely different medium. It felt like the core reason that I wanted to have the app installed was gone.

How much I loved this concept really stuck with me. When the app died originally I really wanted to recreate it right then, but it would be another year until I started Lambda School, a year from then when I would create my first version, and another year after that until I could really polish it into something that other people could use.

This is a very simple app conceptually. One piece of art per day, everyone see's the same art. That's it. It is purely because I love that core experience that I built it. I want everyone to have this same experience.

But, holy crap, was it difficult. There's a huge gap between a proof of concept and something much more polished.

I wanted a beautiful website and an extremely easy to use admin area to upload and manage the art itself. I wanted everything to be fast, I wanted it to be easy to deploy, and I wanted it to be cheap as hell to host. I think, somehow, I've been able to finally manage all of this.

A beautiful react single-page-app for the website/front-end admin, an express server/api for the backend, and an electron app for the desktop client. Mix in Netlify, AWS S3/Cloudfront, Heroku, Github actions, and Cloudflare caching on images and api calls. I'll have to do a technical deep dive in a future post, but the coordination between all these things was by far the most complex thing I've ever had the opportunity to build.

I think I can honestly say this is the culmination of a life long dream to be able to design, build, and deploy apps.

And, for a first app, I really am glad this is it. It is a pure app: No scheme to get you to buy anything. No agenda. It's purely about the experience of art.

It's hard to convey how much you'll love it too. Download it, and don't do anything. Just let your desktop change each day. Have some friends download it. Suddenly you're talking about art. It's a subtle thing, and it makes me unreasonably happy.

Being Curious

Thu, 13 May 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Be curious, not judgmental - Walt Whitman

The other day I listened to a podcast between Ezra Klein and Judson Brewer talking about anxiety. If you have even mild bouts of anxiety, I highly recommend it: Ezra Klein and Judson Brewer on Anxiety

The core takeaway for me was around meditation, and how a key component of that is curiosity. A ton of meditation centers around focusing on your breath, but what does it mean to focus on your breath?

I did a Vipassana around 7 years ago. The long and short is that it's a 10-day meditation retreat, free of charge, where you meditate silently for approximately 11 hours a day (with breaks for eating/walking/napping in between sessions). It is very intense, which is what attracted me to it in the first place. While I've gotten a few people to do it, I get why most people are not into the idea. It sounds like work, and really, it is. Most would rather go to the beach, and that's valid.

But for me, someone who has pretty consistently struggled to maintain a sense of inner peace, it sounded like a key to unlocking my self. And, in many ways, it has become an incredible tool in my tool belt. I always feel better after doing it. At the same time, I really fight with it. It has always felt like making myself exercise, or do something against my will. Buster Benson talks a bit about this in his post Better than Meditation.

For me, I always feel like I'm enduring meditation. That the goal is just to get to the end and then I will be free. I will have done the chore. However, doing this, I've noticed that I actually feel this way about a lot of things.

If I just get through this project at Lambda School, I will be done with this pain. If I can just save X amount, I can get this Y. If I can just get through the end of this week, I'll be free this weekend. If I just get this job, this apartment, this life.

I'm not the first person to have this realization. We are all on the hedonic treadmill to some degree or another. But do I want to spend my whole life just anticipating things? When do I actually get to enjoy things?

I recently saw a bit of an interview on Twitter with Mads Mikkelson where he mentions his philosophy about life, and it struck me as the most ideal possible way to really live:

this answer from mads mikkelsen has literally stopped me in my tracks pic.twitter.com/vbUAphPj9c
— lucy ford (@lucyj_ford) April 20, 2021

This brings us back to curiosity. In the interview, Judson talks about curiosity as being a way of subverting your natural tendency to anticipate or ruminate. By being curious about the present, you take your attention away from the past and future, which don't actually exist. Instead of just trying to get past your current state, you develop an interest in it, even if it feels painful.

How do you stop being anxious about the future? Develop an interest in the present. What is happening presently? You are breathing, you are existing in this world, everything about your circumstances is a miracle. Daniel Kaluuya agrees.

So what's happening right now. What is your breath like. What are the nuances of it. What does it feel like leaving your nose. What's the quality of your breath? How hot is it? How many seconds can you maintain focus on your breath? Can you just observe? Can you witness things? How long can you be curious about the current moment?

What is the current problem you are facing in life? Can you treat it like it's a puzzle? A fun game? Or is it something to be endured? Is life just to be struggled against until you die? Or can you see it as an incredible opportunity, something to be curious about, to enjoy?

I read this article by Richard Feynman the other day around him finding his way back to loving physics. He reframed things through curiosity and play.

I'm not sure why that podcast with Ezra Klein pulled this all together for me, but it hit me hard. Listen to it! In the meantime, I'm going to try and remain curious.

Feedback Loops, Momentum, and Excitement

Thu, 29 Aug 2019 00:00:00 GMT

When building products, there are two things that seem extremely important: scope and speed to feedback.

If you can ruthlessly prioritize, you can focus. If you can tighten your feedback loops, you can iterate faster. Both of these things will allow you to move very fast in the right direction. But more than that, James Somers talks about the perceived weight of work being reduced dramatically by working quickly in general: Speed Matters

In essence, if something takes a long time, you will avoid it. If it happens quickly, you will do more of it.

The same thing is true of the end-user's experience of the software itself. If they can focus and the software feels fast, they will use it more. The pleasure of using it makes you want to use it more. Craig Mod writes about this beautifully here: Fast Software, the Best Software

While reading up on feedback loops I ran across Andrew Certain's explanation of how communication and consensus can cripple the feedback loops that allow software to be developed faster. In order to increase speed at Amazon, Bezos basically said to ditch the idea of avoiding duplication of effort in order to execute faster (read the whole thread!):

Part of the reason for Amazon's incredible success across a staggering array of ventures is our focus on pushing autonomy down as far as possible. Jeff said from the start, "I don't want to make communication more efficient - I want there to be less communication!"
— Andrew Certain (@tacertain) August 26, 2019

The cost of communication, transparency, and consensus was so high that it wasn't worth the effort. It was actually better to get rid of cross-team communication and heavily segment the application in order to ship new products faster. Werner Vogels, Amazon's CTO goes into more detail here: Modern Applications at AWS.

This is an almost heretical idea on its face and goes against a core tenant of software development: Don't repeat yourself!

The ideas of 'fail fast' and 'move fast and break things' are now widely satirized. However, I think they're still deeply true. Moving fast is exciting, just look at any new burgeoning software framework. People love to get involved in projects that really feel fast. They're rewarding and there's the most opportunity to really stand out and feel like your contribution matters.

Anything that slows you down should be looked at with skepticism and there should be insanely high value associated with the trade-off.

Rationalizing design

Fri, 02 Aug 2019 00:00:00 GMT

One of the things that got design a seat at the table was data-driven decision making that could be defended. I don't have any evidence to support this, but I really think that design's difficulty in justifying itself to engineering is why products in technology had pretty poor design until the last 10 years.

Apple really changed this around the time of the iPhone. It was as if suddenly everyone awoke from their self-imposed stupor and realized that design is meaningful to people. Further, people could prove it by creating well designed applications for the AppStore and watching them win. While many in engineering wrote off Apple as just being a good marketer to idiots who didn't care what was in their pocket (ask anyone over 30 about this), over time the appreciation for polished, thoughtful design and experience became mainstream among many companies.

So that's awesome right? People finally appreciate designers! However, one big problem I have regarding this nice little seat at the table is defensibility. I know, I know, not a popular thing to say nowadays. Let's explore.

Asana, Twitter, Google, Pinterest, Yelp, Amazon and many more all have retained their early ancestral structure that have been polished and refined over time. Why? If data was so important to design, shouldn't we have realized those early, non-data-driven approaches were wrong? Shouldn't the data suggest that we do something entirely different? Did the original designer or team just, gasp, have a good intuitive sense about things??

One thing that really brought this to the forefront of my mind was an article about how Notion saved itself from death.

Ivan talks about how he spent upwards of 18 hours a day designing. When you are iterating at that rate, you're working off of intuition and judgement, plain and simple. Sure, he spent time talking through his ideas with Simon, but there wasn't a written out plan for the design that he then just executed. Instead he made tons of versions, evaluated them using his and Simon's judgement and intuition, and chose what felt like the best choice.

“If the taste is there, which you can grow by studying typography and the giants of industry, you can churn out versions until you find the best one.” - Ivan

I know. Feelings. Damn.

We, as designers, sometimes just know that something is good. It feels good. We design a ton of versions, and through exposing that design to both our and our teammates judgement we file off the rough edges, massage it, and finally get to the point where it feels 'inevitable'.

How do you defend that? How do you justify or rationalize it?

{% include image.html url="/images/unsplash-artist-description-card.jpg" %}

It reminds me of those little cards that artists put next to their paintings, explaining their intentions. Why is this necessary? Isn't this superfluous? I understand designers are problem solvers, not artists, but can it all be explained? Should it all be explained? Further, if you do explain it, isn't it just hindsight analysis? What's the point? Isn't it just performative?

Another metaphor: Comedy. How do you rationalize or justify a joke? Jokes are forged through judgement and experience. Whether or not they were good is decided by the audience.

Good design, like good art, stands on its own. It needs no defense. It either works or it doesn't.

Design for Repetition

Tue, 30 Jul 2019 00:00:00 GMT

After building multiple applications used by thousands of paying customers I feel like I've converged on a philosophy of design that could be summed up as 'Design for Repetition'.

Is your app used a lot? Or a little? Is your app meant to be engaging? Or are people supposed to get in and out?

A lot of design decisions can be solved by understanding not just the way your user wants to interact with your application, but by how often.

With Badger, our customers interact with the app many times during a workday and perform a few interactions almost constantly. With all this repetition, our goals converged on the following:

Get the hell out of the way
Make it really easy to undo/redo actions
Reduce steps, confirmation, and any explicit actions as much as possible
Don't hide buttons (for example, on hover-state)

With enough repetition you barely had to pay attention to what you were doing within our application. Making mistakes was a non-issue, you could quickly undo/redo whatever action had occurred. Did they upload bad data? No big deal, they can undo that. Did they mess up their route? No worries, they can quickly clear and re-add items through multiple points of entry intuitively and in seconds. Did they click the wrong item during a check-in? Just click again and choose the new option.

This creates strong feedback loops where poeple ultimately feel safe in the app. Instead of something that might betray their trust, it becomes an extension of them.

Think about any tool in a woodshop. The tool is designed for constant, repetitive actions, so that you can rely on it, you can trust it. With enough time, you don't have to think about it.

Make software that is designed for repetition.

The Crippling, Imaginary Audience

Mon, 27 May 2019 00:00:00 GMT

When I was younger I had multiple websites where I posted often. I didn't care what I wrote because I was just writing for my friends. Doing this improved my writing dramatically. It forced me to focus on who my audience was, have a goal in writing (always write to persuade!), and to write for actual consumption. People I knew actually read my site! Having any audience at all was just fun.

But then I got fired for talking shit about my boss. One of my coworkers who didn't like me ratted me out. I was nineteen years old and a complete dumbass. The public nature of the internet was just starting to rear its ugly head and I was one of a number of people who were getting fired for confusing their personal websites for a secluded corner of the internet. This appears to be a difficult lesson to learn, as this still happens constantly to people on Twitter well over a decade later.

Sometimes twitter is like that downstairs storage room in a horror movie from which odd sounds emerge. Best to walk right past it. Don’t touch the door. Whatever’s going on in there, let it play out.
— walter kirn (@walterkirn) August 6, 2019

The public nature of the internet is a hard thing to wrap your head around. Humans weren't built to appreciate this kind of scale. People constantly post things that are inflammatory, offensive, disrespectful, off-color, wrong-headed, problematic, bad jokes, and more. To their friends, who appreciate the human at the core of it, these posts are just one aspect of a person who contains multitudes. But this melts away once you get to the first person who hasn't met them. Suddenly, you have actor-observer bias running rampant.

Cast a wide enough net, and you are stripped of your humanity. You become infamous, an overnight celebrity with all the scrutiny that comes with it.

It's a terrifying potential.

Recently, a number of thoughtful articles have been written on what is now a big enough problem to be called 'cancel culture':

The mob wants justice and it wants public executions. You're a seventeen year-old kid? Too bad, you are a monster now. The President and you had a tryst? Sorry, you're a slut and the butt of jokes for life. The human desire for blood-lust hasn't abated, it has just changed form.

"Each day on twitter there is one main character. The goal is to never be it." this is .. deeply true. Originally tweeted by @maplecocaine who, er, apparently deleted their account..?
— Jeff Atwood (@codinghorror) April 8, 2019

So why post at all? Why voice any opinions in such a dangerous environment?

I still have a lot of difficulty with this. For now at least, the lesson might be that you shouldn't touch anything that is controversial unless you have some very well defined thoughts on the subject. If you haven't done your research and you haven't debated someone knowledgeable, leave it alone. As soon as you put words to paper, you are inviting people to pick it apart. This is not you and your friends around a beer.

Perhaps this isn't a bad lesson. We are not all journalists and comedians. We are not prepared for the responsibility and weight of our words. For many of us, perhaps only managers, teachers, and our parents have read our writing. And now you want the whole internet to respond?

Unless you really want to enter the arena, maybe best to leave it to someone else.