That's genuinely why I go. Not for the photos — for the moment you realise something you assumed was universal was just a local habit. It's the fastest way I know to find the edges of your own thinking.
It's not a hobby section.
Every product decision carries an assumption about how people behave. Most of those assumptions come from the small sample of people we happen to live among.
Travelling is the cheapest correction I've found — a repeated, practical reminder that the default isn't universal. It's made me a better interviewer of stakeholders, a more careful reader of data, and considerably slower to say "users obviously want…"
Trips outside the US, grouped by region — fjords in Norway, tombs in the Valley of the Kings, jungle outside Cartagena. No finish line, just an ongoing argument with my own assumptions.
A finite list, a long timeline, and a spreadsheet color-coded more than it should be. Yosemite set the bar; sixty more to go.
Avid hiker — which in practice means I've read more comparative reviews of waterproof boots than any reasonable person should. Currently in Salomon X Ultra 360 Edge GTX.
This site started as a Python static-site generator I built to be managed entirely from an iPad, with GitHub Actions doing the deploy. Constraints make better tools.
Mostly about AI agents and evaluation, sometimes about the places above. If an idea doesn’t survive being written down, it probably wasn’t as solid as I thought.
I travel to see how people live and think somewhere my defaults don't apply. It's the fastest way I know to find out which of your assumptions were real principles and which were just local habits — a useful thing to practise if you build products for people who aren't you.
Paris was love at first sight — the Louvre, a ride down the Seine, the Eiffel Tower, and every building trimmed in the same cream stone and black iron. Giverny, an hour outside the city, was the quiet counterpoint: Monet’s garden truly looked just as breathtaking as his paintings.
Rome moves fast for a city carrying two thousand years of history — ruins and traffic in the same breath — it takes real effort to keep up. Tuscany runs on a different clock entirely: Long lunches, good wine, and time with family just enjoying the moment. Same country, two completely different rhythms.
Madrid is young, loud in the best way, and dressed in beautiful old European architecture that runs later than any city I’ve been to. Sobrino de Botín, in the old town, has been serving the same roast since 1725 — Guinness calls it the oldest restaurant in the world. Nobody here seems to believe in an early night.
Oslo felt unexpectedly modern for a city its size — waterfront saunas moored right in the fjord facing the Opera House, easy warmth from strangers, and some of the best fish I’ve had anywhere. The city has hosted the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony every December since 1901. Not the reserved Scandinavia I was expecting.
Blue water boxed in by green mountains, and more hiking than sightseeing — Lofoten is the most beautiful place I’ve stood in. The islands sit far enough north that the sun barely sets between late May and mid-July, so evenings stretch on with nowhere for the light to go. Hard to describe without sounding like I’m exaggerating.
A few days in Tokyo, then a bullet train to Kyoto to see where the history actually happened. Tokyo is relentlessly modern and quietly polite — orderly in a way that surprised me. Kyoto is its older, slower sibling, home to more than a thousand temples and shrines. Different worlds, sharing one thread.
Everything here feels deliberate — the Botanic Garden is Singapore’s only UNESCO World Heritage Site, Sentosa’s architecture is carefully curated, meanwhile the Michelin-starred hawker stalls beat even Gordon Ramsey in the kitchen. Singapore is proof that dense and modern doesn’t have to mean careless.
We went into the tombs at the Valley of the Kings, cut into the desert cliffs deliberately to fool tomb robbers — most eventually found a way in anyway. Tutankhamun’s was the rare exception, discovered nearly untouched in 1922, still packed with gold after 3,000 years. Cairo seemed materially poor in places, but I was endlessly amazed by the history all around it.
Boats into the jungle outside Cartagena and Santa Marta, a few hikes, and a level of caution that made clear not everywhere is built for tourists. Cartagena’s walled old town has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1984 — Miami’s energy wrapped in colonial color, with balconies dripping in bougainvillea over every street.
Drove up from Chicago meaning to see the falls and stayed three days instead — a boat ride into the spray, a zipline above the gorge, and a side trip to a wildlife park to watch animals roam somewhere closer to the wild. Niagara is actually three separate waterfalls, not one, and the boat gets you close enough to feel all of them at once.
A glacier landing near Denali, ice trekking on Root Glacier by the abandoned copper town of Kennecott, panning for gold, hiking to Russian Falls, and a floatplane trip to Crescent Lake to watch bears from a respectful distance. Ninilchik and Seldovia added a strange, warm detour into Alaska’s Russian heritage.
Several days split between the city and day trips out to wineries in Napa and Sonoma, an hour or so north. The Golden Gate Bridge opened in 1937 and is painted “International Orange” specifically so it stays visible through the fog that rolls in most afternoons — which explains a lot about the light in every photo we took.
We covered the landmarks you’d expect — Times Square, Central Park, the Brooklyn Bridge, the view from the Empire State Building — and none of it prepared us for how fast the city actually moves. Everything felt bigger, louder, and more crowded than we imagined, in a way photos never quite capture.
Two days was enough to walk the town and spend an afternoon at the Andy Warhol Museum — the largest museum in North America devoted to a single artist, and an easy pick for a longtime fan. The city itself surprised us: hillier, greener, and more artsy than the steel-town reputation suggests.
The rest of the world doesn't have a checklist. But sixty-three parks do.
A finite list and a long timeline. It's the same instinct that shows up in my work — pick something genuinely hard, make it a system, and keep going long after the novelty wears off.
Started as a way to see the country. Turned into a long-running project with a spreadsheet, a gear list, and strong opinions about waterproof boots. Yosemite is still the one that reset my sense of scale.
Yosemite kept surprising me — El Capitan up close, a bear in the woods I had no idea how to react to, and a drive that climbed high enough to disappear into the clouds. Scorched hillsides from an old wildfire were a quiet reminder of how fragile it all is. The giant sequoias command a respect you don't expect to feel for a tree.
Photos don't prepare you for the scale — a mile deep, up to eighteen miles across, with nearly two billion years of rock layers stacked into the walls. The red rock stretches so far in every direction it starts to feel more like Mars than Arizona. I've genuinely never seen anything like it, and I'm not sure a return trip would change that.
The ridgelines never seem to end, and the clouds settle right down onto the mountaintops like they decided to stay awhile. Trees, waterfalls, and trail after trail through green that goes on longer than you expect from anywhere in the East. It is also one of the densest black bear habitats in the country — though I only ever saw the trees move first.