Philosophy
What I'm reading and thinking about, on living, technology, travel, and trying to be deliberate about it all.
On living in four countries and feeling at home in none, and all of them
People ask me where I'm from. I used to say Turkey. Then Colombia. Now I just say "it depends on what you mean by from." There's a specific freedom that comes from not being fully rooted anywhere.
The network engineer's secret: everything is a routing problem
After 20+ years in networking, I've started to see routing logic everywhere. Not as a metaphor, as a genuine mental model.
What Epictetus taught me about downtime and internet outages
Divide everything into what you control and what you don't. Then ruthlessly focus on the first. I think about this every time a network goes down at 2am.
Why I fly drones: it's not about the footage
The footage is a side effect. What I'm actually doing is forcing myself to see a place from a perspective no human body can naturally occupy.
On anger: the Stoic case for pausing before you send that message
Seneca's prescription wasn't suppression, it was delay. Introduce a gap between the feeling and the action.
The case for obsessions over hobbies
The obsessions have produced everything interesting I've ever made or learned. The hobbies mostly produced gear I don't use.
What 20 years of debugging taught me about thinking
The worst sessions shared one thing: I was certain I knew where the problem was before I looked. Certainty made me skip steps.
On food as the most honest form of communication
You can lie in conversation. You can perform in writing. But a dish is what it is. The technique is visible in the result.
Memento mori isn't morbid, it's clarifying
The Stoics practiced the deliberate contemplation of death. Not as a morbid exercise, as a focusing mechanism.