I spent a while this summer reading math books and popular science, trying to figure out what a life in "research" might look like; in late Spring I began to sense that it was time to wake up my brain and start thinking again, and the best way forward seemed »

I'm obsessed with sbt-microsites. Sbt-microsites is a fantastic plugin for SBT (the Scala Build Tool) that makes it easy to generate a beautiful sidecar site for your software project, full of code checked by your CI! I recently built a microsite for ScalaRL, my in-progress functional Reinforcement Learning library, and »

I've just finished retooling my development environment, and the process was annoying enough that I thought I'd write it up here, for myself in the future, and for you in the present. tl;dr; I ended up porting my old Emacs config, based on the literate emacs24-starter-kit, over to Spacemacs, »

Welcome back to my report of the 2018 Tahoe 200. If you haven't read Part 1 and care about background and context, go check it out and come on back. Otherwise enjoy the tale! Table of ContentsHeavenly Aid Station (102)Heavenly (102) to Armstrong (117)Armstrong (117) to Housewife Hill »

I never suspected that 100 mile races would be a gateway drug for... 200 mile races, but here I am, polishing off my race report for the Tahoe 200. What went wrong in my past? Neglectful parents? A broken home? The answers lie buried somewhere in the following account. First, »

I'll present this here with little comment for those who track it down. This is a story I wrote in 7th grade for Henry Edwards's english class. I'm most proud of the cover art, designed by yours truly. Enjoy! Introduction"... And today for lunch, we will be having apple Juice, »

I started rock climbing because it freed me from the monotony of training for sprint kayak. Climbing on rock is athletic and inspiring, and takes you to beautiful places. It can also be dangerous. Your decisions matter when you're hanging from tired fingers far off the ground. The danger and »

Last Spring, while preparing for my attempt on the Rainier Infinity Loop, I bought two books on Mt Rainier... and failed to read either of them. My invite to that adventure had come out of nowhere; I knew nothing about the park, the area, the mountain or its history, and »

I recently ingested psilocybin mushrooms for the first time in my life, a decision that would have shocked and disappointed the straight-edged sprint kayaker I used to be. And I'm alive! I'm sane! My goal was to have some sort of spiritual experience; or, more accurately, to figure out how »

In September of 2017 I raced my first ever mountain bike race - the Vapor Trail 125, the hardest race I could find up in the mountains of Colorado. After four years of 100 mile running races I was well and truly burned out on the idea of spending my »

On June 8th I completed the Texas Water Safari, a 260 mile canoe race down in Texas that runs rivers from San Marcos to the Gulf of Mexico. My 4-man boat (filled by Jason Antin, Andrew Soles and Andrew Stephens) finished early Monday morning after 44 hours and 14 minutes »

In 2016, as part of my years-long quest to make it into the Hardrock 100, I signed up to race the IMTUF 100. IMTUF stands for "Idaho Mountain Trail Ultra Festival", and I'll admit that before the event, I found it difficult to tell people about the "I'm Tough" without »

Earlier this month I attempted to complete the biggest endurance adventure of my life: the Rainier Infinity Loop, a project dreamed up by the late Chad Kellogg. The line physically traces out a rather sloppy infinity sign by traveling over Mount Rainier, the most glaciated peak in the lower 48, »

I write software for fun and profit, and writing great software - like all creative work - requires long stretches of deep thought. I don't know where creative insights come from, but two things are clear to me about how to find them: You can study and obsess over a »

I want to expand on the last piece I wrote on courage and goals, and talk about some of the traps that endurance racing can set for athletes looking to push their limits. That piece makes the case that aggressive goals are important because they force your ego to adapt, »