Now

Living a calm and productive life in the Philippines since 2019. Prior to that, my family called New York City home for almost a decade.

Currently doing innovation and product leadership work for the Palawan Group of Companies, the Philippines’ leading non-bank financial services provider. Our flagship service, PalawanPay, launched in April of 2022 (now with over 23 million users). Asia just scales differently.

I still maintain a nano-consulting practice with Southpaw Labs LLC, with a few clients on retainer. Side projects augment your professional development. I highly recommend it.

Struggled but crossed the finish line at the Berlin Marathon last year. It wasn’t quite the result that I trained for so I’m now thinking of a rematch (maybe another major). I’ve run a total of 1 marathon, 4 half-marathons and a 10K in 2025. I plan to run much less in 2026 but I just finished a half-marathon back in January. And I got faster. 🤷‍♂️

😘 I really like these things.

• Digital Gardens – I’ve been doing a considerable amount of (private and public) digital gardening the moment I transitioned to Notion (from Evernote) back in 2017. I do all sorts of stuff in Notion, ranging from my yearly dashboard, hobby logs(!), a system to process loose paper-based notes, weekly meal plans, shopping trackers and all sorts of stuff. I’ve performed a lot of garden “remodelings” through the years and these continue to evolve. Even this site runs on Notion.
• Building Stuff with Claude - I’m having way too much fun with Claude right now and I’ve built so much stuff over the past few weeks. From a personal computing standpoint, I see this as the application/implementation layer for all my structured (Notion) and unstructured (Day One) data. I recently held a workshop for Palawan folk on this as well, with the intention of claudepilling more people. I think it’s working.
• Story Formats – Playing with freeform tools like Notion and Day One gave me an opportunity to experiment with story formats. Story formats can be described as structured content that have clear intent. Think “Hot Ones”, “Wordle” and “Humans of New York”. I’ve played around with monthly reviews, show recaps, media diet posts, etc in my private journal. The newsletter “Formats Unpacked” by Hugh Garry explains this much better than I do. It’s also a great way to hone my writing skills as well.
• Teetotalism - I never thought my Oura ring would convince me that alcohol’s not doing my body any favors. I’ve recently reduced my alcohol consumption by as much as 80%, also aided by my discovery of non-alcoholic beer. I feel great and I hope to wean myself more.
• Other Small Things - Managing an overengineered iCal setup. Strength & Conditioning. Intermittent Fasting. Creatine. The Ricoh GR IV. Maybe Diablo.

🪓 I still do the following:

Record all my exercises in Strava, train in Runna, log food in MyFitnessPal, log stuff in Logger, scrobble music in Last.FM, track app usage in Rescuetime, checkin in via the Swarm App, play Wordle and tally finances in Moneywell. And most recently, optimizing my sleep (among other things) with my Oura Ring. Then started out with Zero too.

Also, I think Flighty is an awesome app but they really need an Android version soon (I’m thinking of jumping ship to the Android ecosystem soon).

Starting a new Goodreads challenge in 2026. I recently enjoyed “Things Become Other Things” by Craig Mod, “Reshuffle” by Sangeet Paul Choudary, “Perfection” by Vincenzo Latronico and R.F. Kuang’s “Yellowface”. And I’m currently on book four of the “Dungeon Crawler Carl” series by Matt Dinniman.

Writing 1,500 words a day on average with the DayOne app but it’s been going way, way over that lately. I should learn to be more concise.

😗 I’m curious about:

Gold! Personal Holding Companies. Personal Creative Studios. The right amount of exercise. Fiber. Protein.

Last updated April 29, 2026.