7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 4 My wife looked at me one day and said, "You're supposed to be the communicator. Communicate with me." That's when I started paying attention to how I actually think. And what I realized is that my thoughts aren't fully formed until they come out of my mouth. They … Continue reading Find How You Work

7-40 Challenge | Planning Week I work in data. A big part of my job involves tracing data pipelines, reading SQL, debugging problems, and figuring out where things break. I've been doing it for almost twenty years. Recently I've been using AI — specifically Claude — as a working partner in that process. And it's … Continue reading AI: The Machine Is Only as Good as the Operator

In July of 2018 I sat down at a keyboard and wrote a post about communication. I had just come through chemo and surgery to clean out my lymph nodes — my second time with cancer, the first having been in 2004. I was on short-term disability. I was waiting to go back to my … Continue reading What I Wrote in 2018

I just finished Charles Duhigg’s Supercommunicators. The book teaches a set of techniques for understanding people — listening so they feel heard, matching their conversational mode, building enough trust that real exchange becomes possible. The techniques are real and they work. What’s missing from the book — and from most communication writing — is a … Continue reading Communication, Negotiation, and Capitulation

Yesterday a 22-year-old developer named Austin Kennedy posted something on X that has been viewed over a million times. “I’m 22 years old and Claude Code is deteriorating my brain. Every single day for the last 6 months I’ve had 6 to 8 Claude Code terminals open, waiting for a response just so I can … Continue reading AI: Abdication or Augmentation