the last few days, the parts of my brain i’ve been using of late to write to you have been devoted to the activity of getting on LinkedIn for the first time in my life as i slowly begin to shift from my self-enforced severance-funded sabbatical summer to my self-enforced “you gotta get another job soon enough and it will not happen instantly and without you having to actually try” autumn. i don’t have that much to show for it yet and if there was someone who was grading my unpaid labor toward getting new paid labor, i would probably already be on a PIP, but luckily i am my own supervisor for now and i truly believe in my long-term potential.

i remember a writer in my MFA program who would write these very long, dense, hard-to-follow experimental sensory prose poem things that sometimes did interesting stuff with language but also never really fully came together as stories and were not enjoyable to read or write about or talk about (it was later revealed (by her, in what was seemingly intended as a kind of proud gotcha, but actually just pissed everyone off at her even more) that she was mostly just resubmitting to workshop things that she had already written, workshopped, and in some cases published before starting the program. i would call foul on that except i also totally did it once when i couldn’t get inspired on a deadline, so glass houses).

by the end of the program, i would say mostly everybody in my cohort disliked her, which was in part due to her un-workshoppable work and in part to her clear lack of care for and interest in other people’s work but imo mostly due to the fact that she was just kind of a prickly, unpleasant person (in workshop and outside it) and tbh maybe a lil’ bit of a sociopath (one of multiple people in my program i would classify as such: to read a great book about another one, check out In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado).

my feeling about workshop is that while it can provide a valuable structure when you’re getting started writing, it eventually makes an unpleasant person out of everyone, myself included (i still have critique notes i wrote buried in the bowels of my Google Drive and experience a full-body cringe to even glance at the filenames). while i was a participant in my own graduate workshops, i was earning my living teaching workshops to undergraduates. the vogue in pedagogy then was student-led learning and i have always been a trend-chaser, so in my “advanced” 200 level class, after we did our first set of workshops, where i had carefully guided and managed the discussion of each work, i said, “okay everybody, so for the next round, we’re gonna try an experiment: you all are leading the workshops and i’m not going to say a single word.”

cut to the workshops, which were terrible lol and where almost immediately a dynamic developed where students would try to interpret my micro facial reactions and say things like “i think Justin is thinking this story doesn’t really have a problem at the core of the plot.” i eventually abandoned the exercise entirely when the workshop was reviewing the single best undergraduate story i received in my entire teaching career (by a country mile), on some post-Amy Gaitskill, proto-Melissa Broder shit, and everyone hated the “unlikeable” narrator and the “weird” stuff the story was about and had no praise at all and i could not help myself i just had to be like “NO ACTUALLY EVERYONE THIS STORY IS INCREDIBLE BECAUSE A, B, C, D, E, F".

(i did win an award that year for my excellent teaching, as i recently put in my LinkedIn education section. this also brings to mind an anecdote i wrote about in this newsletter years ago, from after i had graduated and become a townie working as a secretary at the university. i was walking up the main street downtown and saw, a few blocks away, one of the graduate faculty who led my workshops walking toward me from the opposite direction. i crossed to the other side of the street to avoid having to talk to them and we passed without interacting. then, a couple of blocks later, i saw my perfect genius student walking towards me on my side of the street and i smiled and pulled out my headphones, excited to see if she was still writing and whether my encouragement had meant something to her, but instead she crossed the street and did the same thing to me which sounds like some made-up shit but i swear it happened exactly like that).

i remember at a certain point in our second-year graduate workshops we had an exercise to construct “literary universes” as a way of contextualizing our work into our own personal canons and share with each other and most everybody picked like 5 - 10 books they liked and wrote a sentence or two about them and i created a double-sided single spaced document in tiny font which included probably like 100+ books classified into 15+ groups of bespoke “constellations” with pretentious blurbs showing my deep and broad knowledge of contemporary literature which was incredibly on-brand for me (and one of the (valid) reasons some people also found me annoying as a workshop participant lmao).

during her turn at show-and-tell in the literary universe discussion, this other writer went on a rant, in response i think to the fact that nobody appreciated her work (this was before the revelation that it wasn’t even new work but had been workshopped before in other workshops), and was talking about how she knew people didn’t like her style but this was the only way she could write, the only way that the words came out, so what did we want her to do?

the thing was, though, that this writer, while on the one hand an experimental language artist unappreciated by the philistines of our workshop, was on the other hand a professionalist who was very good at playing the game of fellowships and applications and awards. most of the other people in my program did not write for the internet but she would regularly publish things in the Huffington Post which helped to maintain and advance her platform and which were not written in lyrical fragmented stream-of-consciousness. as someone who was nearing my peak of being a workshop asshole and who was especially tired of her specifically and who was (is) also a Scorpio who thinks of mean things to say constantly and can only suppress so many of them, i raised my hand and was like, “well, I see you write like a normal person in the Huffington Post and you have no problem doing it there, so maybe actually you do have some control over how you write?”

in retrospect, that was a rude and unfair thing to say (like i said peak workshop asshole) and i don’t even remember what she said in response and tbh this is the first time i’ve thought of her in literally years (a blessing!). anyway, this is just to say, in case you were interested in how a person you’re used to reading describe their weird thoughts about internet culture and old indie music and lawnmowers in thousands of words of digressive, parenthetical-riddled lowercase “essays” might flip the switch and try to sound super profesh on main, here’s my LinkedIn “about” bio, the single piece of prose i have worked on the most this week:

I'm a product engineer who started my tech career in customer support but has always loved building. My first big engineering win came while I worked in support at [Company A], where agents had to pore over pages of API logs looking for needles in haystacks. I built a browser script that color coded requests by response status, which, while trivial to code, made it dramatically easier to find what you were looking for. From there, I was hooked on hacking together add-ons, workarounds, scripts, bots, extensions: I love solving problems.

I grew from building on top of products others had built to building those products myself. At [Company B], I was an important contributor to the ground-up rewrite of the core product, the largest engineering project in company history. I also helped develop, launch, and maintain essential integrations with apps like Shopify and Linear. Most recently, as a senior engineer on the Data & Analytics team, I brought new features like company management and conversation categorization to market. While constantly shipping to customers, I've never gotten over making my teammates' lives easier: a Chrome extension I dreamed up, ProxyPal, revolutionized our local dev and acceptance testing process.

I'm a team player through and through. I was [Company B]'s 2025 company MVP and my coworkers know me as someone who will drop whatever he's doing to review your PR, answer your question in Slack, or jump on Zoom to walk you through the weird corner of the codebase you just inherited. I was my guild's most active code reviewer, but I don't believe in overly prescriptive reviews. I look for meaningful issues, I test with my own hands, and then I trust my teammate and get out of the way so their work can ship and go start doing things in the real world: that's the whole point!

My focus is TypeScript front-end development, but I have no fear of climbing across the stack to wherever I'm needed. I understand and respect the critiques of AI and, at the same time, I find it simply magical in terms of what it makes possible in software development. I use it heavily and I've mentored colleagues across engineering, design, product, and support to help get them to their own "aha!" moments. In my heart, I'm still the person who wrote that API log coloring script. I see a problem slowing people down and I can't help wanting to fix it, whether that's a customer stuck in the product, a teammate stuck on a PR, or my company stuck on a process. I'm looking for a product engineering role on a team that ships quickly, communicates clearly, and has fun doing it.

it’s probably too long, but you know me! like poetry, this bio alone will make nothing happen, but like poetry, i’m writing to myself as much as i am to anyone else, figuring it out. i’m trying to dissociate from my coming immersion in getting a job by viewing it a kind of Plimpton-esque experiment / a new way to sate my posting addiction, so i regret to inform there’s more #business like this coming (also, I really do credit my misadventures with the hellscape of workshop critique with making me way better at both giving and receiving code reviews as an engineer now, which is probably an insight I will package and shove into the LinkedIn post machine before too long).

in terms of things you’ll actually want to experience, here are some weekend recs!

• great recent work from Daniel Kolitz and Natasha Stagg on writing, money, and the connection (or lack thereof) between them.

• the god Brandon Taylor came back from a long hiatus with incredible newsletters “i quit reading and almost died” and “they were in the walls” (spoiler: they are rats in his apartment!)

• the new game i have been most addicted to this week is Blood Dungeon (Steam, PS5, Xbox, Switch 2). charming MS Paint aesthetics (for a game called “Blood Dungeon” i think it’s very kid-friendly) + expressive 2d platforming + numbers go up in satisfying ways.

• i haven’t listened to the whole album yet but my most recent heavy rotation song is “GONE FISHING” by Denzel Curry produced by Kenny Beats which has an addictive guitar lick that sounds like “Rap Snitches” (complementary) and is my personal favorite kind of rapping (propulsive punny joyful bravado)

• i started reading and am loving A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies by David Thomson, which tl;dr is maybe the most eminent living film historian writing a blistering critique of the whole medium/form/enterprise of film? so far, it’s angry, funny, and thought-provoking.

• i think maybe gun to my head my favorite desert is chocolate chip cookies and my favorite chocolate chip cookies are these aged-dough cookies that Deborah makes for me. The original recipe is from the website Brown Eyed Baker, but I’m including a scan of Deborah’s printed copy, which includes some scale tweaks, below. make the dough today and bake them tomorrow and you will not regret it.