Hi, I’m Russell. I’m a writer and programmer.

This site is my digital garden, organized into:

• Fiction: Various short stories I’ve written. These days I’m focused on writing novels, though.
• Essays: Non-fiction essays on various non-programming-related topics.
• Technical: Articles on various programming-related topics, including my TIL series.
• Misc: Miscellaneous pages, including my recommended reading lists and my favourite recipes.
• Newsletters: An archive of all the newsletters I’ve sent!
• Logs: I log everything I read, watch, and listen to.
• Gallery: I sometimes take photos, so I put my favourites up here.

I also write a newsletter called rwblog, which is thematically similar but doesn’t overlap in content.

Favorites

Here are some of my favorite things I’ve written here or on my newsletter:

• The Bridge: Borgesian short fiction about a creepy bridge.
• Pattern Language: A guide to some of the concepts I return to a lot. Useful pre-reading for everything else!
• Calendrical and Cartographic Thinking: Comparing how we think when looking at calendars and maps.
• Software Engineers and the Illusion of Explanatory Depth: Are software engineers less vulnerable to the illusion of explanatory depth?
• A REPL for Writing: As a writer, should I deliberately practice time-to-feedback?
• How many programmers does it take to fix a lightbulb? Fermi estimation in computer science interviews as discipline error: Why I don’t like Fermi estimation problems in software engineering interviews.
• Cinema as the cathedral of modernity: Are films the modern equivalent of medieval cathedrals?
• Modernism as Global Monoculture: Is there a single cultural “package” that we can define as modernity?
• Safari is the Lightest Browser: Explaining why I like Safari (hint: it’s the vibes).
• Writing Compiler: My preferred way of thinking about large language models (LLMs).
• How to Read a Lot: My tips on reading a lot.
• Strange Things About Melbourne: Interesting things I noticed while vacationing in Melbourne.
• Communities of Practice: Thinking about why I find it hard to intentionally practice photography.
• New Absurdism: In which I try to give a name to a new genre I see emerging.
• What’s the use of useless questions?: What’s the use of impossible-to-answer questions like “who wrote The Odyssey?”
• My Favorite Bookstore Is A Library: Protip — many libraries are willing to buy books for you!
• Small Things To Make Life Better: aka “cheaper but lovely gifts to give at a surprise white elephant party.”
• In Which I Wax Nostalgic for My Lost Youth: A navel-gazing quarter-life crisis post. It’s funny how badly this has aged in barely a year, but it’s interesting for historical purposes 🙂

CV

Professionally, I am a product engineer at Asana (see my resume). I have a bachelor’s degree in computer science & mathematics from the University of British Columbia. I live in San Francisco with my wife Sherry and our small canine companion Rooibos.

Colophon

This site is built with Astro and Tailwind CSS. It primarily uses the Transitional fonts from Modern Font Stacks. The site is served via Cloudflare Pages. You can see the full source on Github.

Copyright

Unless otherwise specified, all content on this site is licensed under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.