Hello from thirty-four thousand, nine hundred and ninety-one feet. I’m on a return flight from Vancouver to San Francisco, and it is four hours to midnight, so it’s probably time for a letter.

Slopes

I spent this past weekend in Whistler, BC. It felt great to be back in Canada, and I felt great on the skis this time around. I’m a fairly average skier: comfortable on all blues, most blacks, and in solid conditions, I’ll occasionally attempt a double-black.

I had the chance to ski with some great skiers. They all had the background you’d expect: a childhood close to a mountain, parents who were bought in (both figuratively and literally), and a real commitment to the craft. The common thread was simple: lots of hours on the slopes. It was an inspiring reminder that to be good at a thing, you need to do the thing.

I get tripped up by the “slope” of my practice. I’ll optimize how I’m practicing, tweak equipment, read about technique, and generally do everything adjacent to the thing. What matters is showing up and doing it.

Duolingo is a good example of this idea. It gets a lot of flak for being excessively gamified, to the point that the promotional features almost outshine the actual language learning. Some people see that as a flaw. But I agree with Luis von Ahn’s justification: if someone doesn’t open the app, they’re definitely not going to learn anything. First, get them to show up. Then, give them a great learning experience.

I buy that logic—and I still fail to apply it in my own life. My time often disappears into low-friction scrolling and “research” that feels productive but changes nothing. I want to spend it more intentionally on my craft. More time on the slopes, less time thinking about the slope of my growth. More time making music, more time writing, more time programming, more time playing. This is a core ingredient to fulfillment.

Here’s what I’ve been consuming as of late.

• I’m working through two great books right now. The first is Thinking in Systems by Donella H. Meadows. I tried it a while back and bounced early. It’s a bit dry, but systems thinking is a powerful mental model for understanding and shaping the world. Parts of the system dynamics material remind me of network flows from my algorithms class (which is what I think makes it feel a bit boring to me). Seeing that kind of abstraction applied to real examples is the payoff.
• Second: I’m reading some fiction. I’m about halfway through Stephen King’s The Stand. The world-building is the standout, and the pandemic premise is oddly nostalgic only a few years out from COVID.
• I’ve been back on a reality TV kick now that Survivor 50 has started. This season has a Hunger Games flavor. The producers brought back a cast of past superstars and let fans steer parts of the game from home.
• In the open-source world, I reported a bug in the virtualization library Notion uses, @tanstack/virtual, and a fix landed. I first ran into it on Notion’s “Collections” team. It was incredibly pesky, with lots of reports but no consistent repro until a teammate found reliable steps. I used Claude Code (Opus 4.6) to add logging across our app and the library, plus Chrome DevTools MCP to read browser logs. Once I triggered the bug, it spotted the irregularity immediately. I verified it, Claude built a minimal repro, hosted it on GitHub Pages, and wrote up the issue. The maintainers fixed it within days. AI can create (and has created) a lot of noise in open source, but it can also raise the floor on reports and repros. Long-term, I hope libraries get more robust because of it.

That’s all for now. Have a great week!

Michael