Claude Academy, Part 1: An AI Learning Experiment

I heard Tyler Cowen challenge Russ Roberts to run an AI learning experiment. So I ran one. This is what I built.

If I’m not learning, it’s time to leave. That’s the general ethos I’ve taken to my career. I enjoy learning, and life is too short to just coast by. At home, however, the things I want to learn - coffee roasting, homebrewing, obscure historical literature — these aren’t exactly Coursera staples. There’s no MOOC for the Kojiki. Even when there is, the available resources aren’t flexible enough for hobbies – funneling me down paths I’m not ready for or focusing on areas I don’t care about. A recent EconTalk may have just had a solve.

The Open by the Numbers: What the Last 5 Years Tell Us

Five years of CrossFit Open data broken down by movement frequency and pairings — and what I'm personally taking away from it.

The rig-ladder has become the most preferred method of sorting athletes by strength and ability. This year it dawned on me that workouts that were self-sorting were increasing in frequency, and now I have data to confirm those suspicions.

Cheesy Olive Loaf

A richer, brinier take on the cheesy loaf — milk for half the water, green olives, and brown sugar.

Olives belong in bread. And sometimes bread should be the meal. So I added olives to my cheesy bread loaf and upped the fats. This fat and gluten balloon is a celebration of my move back to America. Freedom. Liberty. Calories.

Building a 15-Year CrossFit Open Database with Claude (And Auditing the Results)

I handed Claude a vague goal — build a queryable database of every CrossFit Open workout from 2011 to 2026 — and watched what it did. How it stored data, where it sourced the gaps, and whether I could trust the result.

The 2026 Open just wrapped. And now that the gym is back to normal, I find myself doing what I always do: overthinking the Open workouts. Which movements keep showing up? Are AMRAPs actually more common than For Time workouts, or does it just feel that way? And is the rig ladder format — the one that ends every Open with a pull-up-to-C2B-to-muscle-up escalation — a recent programming method?

A Manager's Guide to Working with Claude

Engineering management on autopilot: Claude automates team summaries, release plans, and engineering metrics—surfacing risks and bottlenecks before I start my day.

I start most mornings with my coffee and two (sometimes three) automated summaries waiting in Slack. One tells me what my team did yesterday—tickets moved, PRs opened, potential bottlenecks. The second checks upcoming releases and cross-examines those with our JIRA board, flagging changes stuck in QA or review. The third is a recap of my team’s weekly performance in terms of velocity and defects. By the time I’m at my desk, I have a good idea of where to put my focus and what to follow up on. These automations let me spend more time diving into PRs and resolving risks and less time pulling data to understand where the risks might be.

Buttery Brioche Loaf Recipe

Rich, pillowy homemade brioche loaf perfect for sandwiches and toast. Easy recipe with step-by-step instructions.

Health be damned, this homemade brioche loaf features sugar, butter, and eggs to create a richhly soft bread ready for toasting or soaking up butter, jelly/jams, sandwich meat, etc. Not rich enough for you? Double the butter and eggs and replace half the water with milk and embrace the fats and cholesterol.

My Gene Cafe Journey So Far

14 roasts into my Gene Cafe journey, documenting my process with 5 bean types and the sensory cues I'm learning to use.

I’m 14 roasts into my home coffee roasting journey with the Gene Cafe and I’m starting to form something of a process. Along with a basic process I am also gaining experience with different bean types and origins. And while I’ve made zero effort understanding coffee roasting from a scientific perspective, I have started to isolate visual, audible, and aromatic cues of how the roast is progressing. The purpose of this blog post is to simply document my process and the results I’ve had with the 5 different types of beans I’ve roasted.

Garlic Bread Loaf

A richly soft bread loaf made with milk, egg, sugar, oil, and garlic.

I’m not sure what possessed me to add garlic to my milk loaf recipe. I had obvious reservations, the primary one of course being my breath, and my secondary reservation being the versatility of such a bread. But doubt and fear are the enemy of creativity. So I put my reservations aside, chopped up some garlic, fried with some olive oil, and created a tasty bread that works great with butter (garlic bread!) and sandwiches.

How Claude AI Became My JIRA Assistant

My experience using Claude as my JIRA assistant and how he has improved the quality of our user stories and bug tasks.

I recently anointed Claude as my new JIRA assistant. As I am also a manager he is by extension my team’s JIRA assistant. I’ve learned that he is a pretty damn good one at that. This blog post is to highlight how I’ve been using Claude as my JIRA assistant, how I’ve incorporated him into my processes, and how I’d like to use him in the future.

First some context with one of my team’s struggles: user stories and acceptance criteria. This has been a persistent challenge for my team. Our stories rarely follow any set of principles to emphasize quality such as INVEST. Instead they are pithy two sentence descriptions that assume a deep knowledge of the products, underlying software, and existing architectural definciencies. In an effort to increase story quality I’ve employed Claude as my JIRA assistant. So far he’s kept me honest when creating tasks and I’m hoping he also keeps my team honest in the future. Here are some lessons I’ve learned so far.

Blackberry Prison Juice Cider

Recipe: Dry Cider. Fermentables: Blackerries, SunRype Apple Juice. Yeast: SafCider AB-1. BJCP Style: C1A. Common Cider.

This is a fancy version of my prison juice cider recipe. With blackberries in season, I decided to experiment using fruit puree in this cider with fresh berries. The colour did not disappoint: perfectly pink with a purple hue. As it aged the colour took on more orange. Unfortunately, the blackberries don’t feature prominently in the taste. But it did offer a bit more depth of flavour than store bought apple juice provides and is a fun regional and seasonal variation to an otherwise boring recipe.