The first system that ever challenged my thinking wasn’t a professor. It was a computer at my grandparents’ house.
I’d sit there for hours, hypnotized by that strange little universe behind the screen. Icons you could move, folders you could open, simple games that felt like portals. I didn’t have the vocabulary for it yet, but I was already falling in love with systems: press this, get that; try again; learn the rules; bend the rules; accidentally break everything; fix it; feel like a wizard for five minutes.
When I was 12, I got my first Mac. That machine wasn’t just a toy, it was an argument. It persuaded me, quietly, that curiosity could be a lifestyle. That you could spend a lifetime chasing the “why” behind the “wow,” and never run out of new rooms to explore.
So when it came time for college, I did what made sense to me. I followed the “why.”
I studied philosophy at Albright College. Then, because I’m either committed or stubborn, and the line between those is thinner than we admit, I went on to get a Master’s of Philosophy at West Chester University.
Philosophy gave me exactly what I hoped it would: a sharper mind and a higher tolerance for uncertainty. It taught me how to separate feelings from reasons without pretending feelings don’t exist. It trained me to look for hidden assumptions. And maybe most importantly, it made me allergic to sloppy thinking, especially my own.
But then I graduated and ran into the most philosophical problem of all. Now what?
I didn’t really want to teach philosophy. I love ideas, but I didn’t want my life to be only seminars and syllabi. I wanted something that let me build, test, and revise. Something where thinking had consequences you could see and measure.
So I did something that made my younger self proud. I went back to the computer.
I started studying code on my own. Not in a neat, linear, “Introduction to Programming” kind of way. More like a long, chaotic apprenticeship with the internet. I watched hundreds of hours of YouTube. I read docs. I broke things. I fixed things. I learned the hard way that “simple” and “easy” are not synonyms.
I pestered AI all day, every day. Languages. Frameworks. Hardware. Operating systems. Build tools. The whole stack. I treated curiosity like a full-time job and AI like an infinitely patient tutor.
Because here’s the thing: AI can absolutely help you learn faster… if you don’t use it to avoid learning.
If you ask it to do the work for you, you’re renting intelligence instead of building it. You might get an answer, but you won’t get better. The only version of “AI-powered” I’m interested in is the one where it forces me to explain my thinking, challenge my assumptions, and sharpen my mental model, not just ship code that I can’t defend.
Philosophy trained me for this more than I expected. Debugging is basically applied logic with emotional consequences. A program is an argument you make to reality: if these conditions are true, then this outcome should follow. When it doesn’t, you don’t get to blame the universe. You interrogate your premises. You follow the evidence. You revise the claim. You try again.
And that’s where Jay Heinrichs came in.
After reading Aristotle’s Guide to Self-Persuasion, I realized something slightly embarrassing and deeply useful: most of my best arguments weren’t the ones I made to other people. They were the ones I made to myself. About who I am, what I value, and what I’m willing to do when no one’s watching.
Aristotle says persuasion isn’t magic. It’s craft. It’s timing. It’s character. It’s reason. It’s emotion. It’s choosing the right words to move a human being, especially the human being in the mirror.
So I decided to build a site that would force me to live inside that craft.
This is my challenge: 200 essays by the time I’m 34. Essays about my life philosophy and what I’m learning about computers and code. At the time I’m writing this, that gives me two years. Which is either perfectly reasonable or completely unhinged.
That’s the point.
It’s a public commitment. My own little self-persuasion machine. A way to turn vague intention into a schedule, and a schedule into identity. I’m not doing this because I already have everything figured out. I’m doing it because writing is how I figure things out. Writing is where ideas stop being fog and start being tools.
Also, I like building with modern frameworks and seeing what’s possible now. (For the record: this site is built with Astro, because new tools still give me that same feeling I had at my grandparents’ computer… like there’s always another room behind the door).
So that’s me. A philosophy kid who followed the “why” until it led back to the “how.” A builder who learned that logic is only powerful when it meets practice. A student of persuasion trying to persuade myself into becoming the kind of person who finishes what he starts.
We’ll see how it goes. Thanks for stopping by.