Michael Bianco

How I Broke My Phone Addiction

The launch of Neuralink started a conversation across the web about the “merge”. The day when you can plug your brain into a computer and communicate with it through your thoughts. No keyboard, mouse, or touch screen. Something out of a sci-fi film. I think Sam Altman has an interesting take: I believe the merge has already started, and we are a few years in. Our phones control us and tell us what to do when; social media feeds determine how we feel; search engines decide what we think. This resonated very strongly with me. My phone does control me to a certain extent and I feel uncomfortable if I hop in the car without it. I’ve been on a kick this year of being intentional about how I use technology…

Learning Clojure by Automating an RSS Reader

I’ve been working on revamping how I consume information. Most of my information consumption has been moved to RSS feeds, but I can’t keep up with the number of articles in my feeds. When I take a look at my reader I tend to get overwhelmed and spend more time than I’d like to trying to "catch up" on information I generally was consuming out of curiosity. Not good. I want articles to be automatically marked as read after they are a month old to eliminate the feeling of being "behind". This is a perfect little project to learn a programming language that’s looked interesting for a while! Building a small project in a new language or technology is the best way to learn…

Reclaiming Your Mind: Creating an Information Diet

There’s been a lot of areas of my life that I’ve been ‘auditing’ and attempting to tweak the habits that have intentionally or accidentally fallen into place. One of these is my information diet: how I find, consume, and process information.I’ve been tracking my time spent on reading/time on the internet and I’m not liking the trend. I’ve felt more addicted to information this year and I want to eliminate that feeling. Revamping my information intake is one way I’m going to do that. It’s worth thinking about why it’s worth spending time consuming information, how I consume information, and how I want to change my information consumption. Categories Stories…

2019 Goal Retrospective

I’ve been doing retrospective’s on my yearly goals for a couple years now. Although it’s a little late, I wouldn’t want to break the habit (plus, I’m trying to open source my thinking). Let’s go! What Worked Creating a distinction between habits and goals. I have a separate “habit document” where I document habits that are important to me. Setting a goal to kickstart a habit. Habit-goals shouldn’t be all, or even most, of your goals for the year but having one or two habit-goals can be really effective at changing behavior. It was useful to commit to an action (like hiring a personal trainer) to force building momentum for a specific habit…

Life Categories for Your 2020 Goals

Each year my wife and I go through a review process where we set goals and habit targets. We’ve been doing it for five years and it’s amazing to see the progress we’ve both made. It’s also been powerful to set joint goals that we can work on together. I’ve found it helpful to think over the "categories" of your life. A couple of years ago I wrote out my main life categories and it’s time to update that list: Spiritual Marriage Kids Health Intellectual Work Adventure, beauty, and fun. Intentionally pursuing outdoor adventure and just-for-fun activities with friends is a new thing for me…

Archiving a QuickBooks Online Account to QuickBooks Desktop

If you run a small business, you probably use QuickBooks. I’ve been impressed with the product: the rate of improvement continues to stay constant over the last couple of years (one of the most important criteria in picking a software platform for your business!) and it’s surprisingly pleasant to use. If you close a company, you’ll want to archive all of your QuickBooks data for at least a couple of years in case you get audited. However, QuickBooks Online does not have a low-cost “audit backup” option to access a read-only version of your data. If you cancel your subscription, you only have 90 days to reactivate your subscription and restore your data…

Why You Should Open Source Your Thinking

Open source software (OSS) has transformed the technology landscape. I can’t imagine any software company build without OSS at the core. What makes OSS magical is the serendipity of how it’s created. Someone throws an initial idea on the internet, and if others have the same problem, they join in and organically refine and improve the original idea. Others silently lurk into the project, start using it, and run into some bugs or edge cases which they report (and sometimes post a fix for). Before you know it, there’s a robust piece of software that has been tested under a variety of circumstances by experts around the world. Amazing. Blogging has similar properties…

Optimize Your Charitable Giving Using a Donor Advised Fund (DAF)

I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of recurring revenue. Building a business or a portfolio of investments which passively create recurring income has been interesting to me since I got my first paycheck. Over the last year I’ve been thinking: why can’t I (slowly) create a charitable asset that kicks off income each year which can go tax-free to charities? This way, instead of giving to an organization once, you can build a mix of assets that generate enough income to perpetually give to the organizations you carry about? This idea, combined with the recent tax law changes that made it more challenging to get a deduction from charitable donations (10k SALT limitation makes it harder to itemize), got me researching…

Habits, Systems, and Scripts

I’ve been ‘auditing’ various areas of my life. After being obsessively focused on work for a long time, it’s been helpful to think deeply about the habits and pre-written scripts that I’ve developed across a bunch of areas of life. In most cases, the habits I’ve adopted over the years are a function of taking the path of least resistance than an intentional choice. Here are some things I’m looking at: Information Consumption (news, email, podcasts, reading, etc) Exercise Eating Prayer Marriage Friendship Thinking through what I want from these categories, where I’m not satisfied, and asking ‘why’ multiple times until I get the root cause of the delta has been insightful…

Handling Web Timeouts in Heroku

I’m a huge fan of Heroku. Way back when, I used to manage the entire deployment infrastructure manually. I’d grab a VPS from RackSpace/AWS, install nginx, configure ruby, tinker with deployment scripts, and then in the weeks ahead endlessly tinker with settings when things didn’t work just right. Although I did enjoy the capture-the-flag feel of finding the right service configuration to solve a problem, once Heroku became a thing I switched over every application I managed. There’s a huge amount of leverage in never having to worry about the details of your deployment infrastructure. Heroku is expensive, but it’s orders-of-magnitude cheaper than hiring a devops expert. However, there are some limitations…

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