Outsourcing Our Cultural Memory

Anil Dash explores why NASA published the Artemis II photos on Flickr, of all places:

By having the public’s images preserved in an independent archive in standard formats, we increase the likelihood of future generations being able to access accurate copies of these historical records.

As I get older, cultural memory and the long-tail archive of our digital lives is on my mind. This site serves as that personal archive for me, and at individual scale, it works. I manage the infrastructure, pay the bills and nurture its development.

Anil makes the good point that at institutional scale, self-hosting is often not a viable option. NASA is naturally more concerned with flying humans into space than managing a website, so the outsourcing of this archive to a responsible, ethical 3rd party is the wise choice, if not the only choice.

I’m glad Flickr is still here and they’ve made commitments to cultural longevity with archival intent. We need more platforms to think this way to ensure the cultural artifacts we’ve been producing for the last several decades remain accessible for generations to come.

Chop wood, carry water

I spent the majority of the weekend working with my hands. It felt good. It felt natural. My mind was clear. I was tired and sore by the end of the day.

When the severe storms blew through last week, we had several trees down. All the limbs missed our house, thankfully, but we were left with a large amount of wood to process. Last weekend was about cutting up the trees and hauling away debris. This weekend was about splitting and storing what the chainsaws diced up last week for our summertime supply of campfire wood.

Before splitting, though, I needed a spot to house the wood so it would stay dry and season appropriately. I could just stack it at the back of the lawn and put a tarp over the pile, but Jilly and I didn’t like the aesthetics of that approach. We wanted something that could dress-up the yard a bit while storing the wood.

Saturday morning I grabbed some pressure-treaded 2x4s and my circular saw and got to work. I am not a carpenter. I’ve done very little construction work, but I decided to just vibe out on the build. Eight feet wide by four feet tall, capped off with a corrugated tin roof. What I ended up with might be laughable to artisan woodworkers, but I enjoyed the creative process of making it with no pre-set plan.

After the firewood rack was complete, it was time to start swinging the axe. Sun’s out, guns out. What a workout. It was warm and I sweat. By the end of the weekend I had blisters on my hands from all the chopping and there’s still more to do.

Throughout the weekend – as I assembled the structure, swung the axe and stacked the wood – I kept returning to the Zen proverb ‘chop wood, carry water.’

Before enlightenment? Chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment? Chop wood, carry water.

The mundane, foundational work of life is important because it reinforces mindfulness, presence, consistency, discipline and humility. This labor did just that. My work this weekend was a meditation through movement and I’m looking forward to splitting the remaining logs, although that will happen after some well-deserved rest.

I Feel the Need, the Need for Speed

My ‘breaking 1:45’ half marathon plan called for 7 miles with intervals this morning. It was 15ºF when I left the house to stretch. I wanted nothing more than to stay indoors with a warm cup of coffee and ease into my day.

The icy air froze my nose hairs as I started the warm-up. An easy 2 mile warm-up still requires you to inhale at rhythm. You know that feeling when you’re about to sneeze but can’t? That’s what the first few breaths felt like.

I passed another runner going the opposite way during the warm-up. We gave each other a nod, acknowledging each other’s dedication and crazy.

Mile 3. Go time. My interval target was 7:00/mile. Within a few yards of starting, my lungs felt like they were on fire as I gulped frigid breath to stay on pace. Ladders, up and down. 400, 800, 1200.

It was a helluva workout. I’m hoping these tough speedwork sessions pay off in May.

Ethical Streaming from the Cloud

We all know Spotify and other big tech music streaming services are evil. They take advantage of artists, their algorithmic business models are designed to flatten the cultural bell curve, and they directly support ICE. I quit using Spotify ages ago, but since that decision I’ve struggled to find a cloud-based streaming platform that was ethical to artists, aligned with my personal political worldview, and accessible to me everywhere and on all my devices.

My first move after Spotify was to switch to Apple’s iTunes Match, not to be confused with Apple Music (which has a similar business model ickiness to Spotify). Rather, iTunes Match sync’d my locally-stored music collection with Apple’s cloud servers, making my purchased music collection accessible on all my Apple devices. This worked well for me for several years. I was able to purchase digital music directly from artists or via ethical outlets like Bandcamp, import the files into my music library on my laptop, and poof – the music would be available on my phone.

Somewhere along the line though, iTunes Match broke. I think it coincided with the release of iOS 26. After that update new additions to my collection would not sync to my phone. I was heartbroken.

My next step was to sync my collection to my phone via a hardwire, like a Neanderthal. This was inconvenient but manageable, and I found the offline availability of the collection to be wonderful. My collection is large, however, and I needed to curate what I was syncing to my phone due to storage capacity. I needed to find a better way to have access to all my music.

Enter Navidrome. I never read blog post comments, but a note from Thomas Brand on Manton’s post about Spotify burnout was enough to peak my interest. Navidrome is a free, open source personal streaming service. After a few minutes reading the docs, I decided to give it a go.

The first thing I needed was a place to host the Navidrome instance. I chose PikaPods because they have an out-of-the-box managed integration with Navidrome and the hosting cost estimate for a collection like mine was ~ $3.00 per month. The price is right!

Creating pod and installing the Navidrome app took me about 10 minutes. I uploaded a Nirvana’s In Utero as a test to see how it all worked. Listening in the browser on my laptop, it sounded great. Could Navidrome become my radio-friendly unit shifter?

But what about listening on my phone? Navidrome doesn’t have a native iOS app, but there are several options that support streaming from Navidrome. After playing around with a few, I settled on Amperfy which is open source, feature-rich and seems to have the most elegant UI of the mobile apps I tried. Yep, works as advertised. Francis Farmer did indeed get her revenge on Seattle via Amperfy’s CarPlay integration as I drove to pick up my kid last evening.

With a quick, multi-device test complete. I bit the bullet and transferred my entire collection via SFTP. It took most of the night, but I am now live with a cross-platform, multi-device, ethical streaming workflow that I think will serve me well into the future. I’m excited to have access to my entire collection on all my devices again.

A digital music player interface displays various album covers and controls for playback at the bottom.

Just Pull Up

Pull-ups are an activity I’ve wanted to be good at for a long time, however the truth is I hate them. I’ve tried to work them into my exercise rotation many times but they’ve never stuck. For as long as I can remember I’ve despised doing them, probably because I’ve got a runner’s body with toothpicks for arms.

Well, 2026 is the year I will get better at pull-ups. A few days ago I bought a pull-up bar and hung it from the door frame of my office. I chose this location because it’s unavoidable as I pass through this threshhold numerous times a day. I wanted an undeniable way to establish muscle memory and create a habbit.

For the past few days, each time I enter and leave, I do as many pull-ups as I can. Entering in the morning, pullups. Grabbing a refill of coffee, pullups. Hitting the head, pullups. Leaving for the evening…you get the picture.

It started on Monday when I could not complete just one good-form rep. Today is Thursday and I just completed five pull-ups as I entered the room to sit down and write this, which feels like a small milestone. My goal now is to progress to the point of being able to do ten perfect-form pull-ups.

I’m not sharing this to humble brag, although I am proud of the progress. I’m sharing as an acknowledgement that the human body and mind are amazing things. All I needed was the persistent reminder to keep trying. Repitition and consistency are the enablers of rapid growth and progress. I’ve known this, but it’s interesting to see tactile results so clearly in just a few days.

The Promise is Perception

Casey Newton in Platformer:

One of the more famous papers about artificial intelligence last year came from METR, a nonprofit that evaluates frontier AI models. In July, it published results of a randomized controlled trial studying experienced open-source developers. It found that when they use AI tools, completing tasks takes them 19 percent longer than when they go without. That was surprising enough. But the real twist is that when these same developers were asked what AI had done for them, they reported that it had sped them up by 20 percent.

This was a fascinating dive into the professional productivity that’s promised by our AI overlords. We’re starting to learn that much of this productivty is perceived. I’ve felt this in my own professional life, and have drastically reduced my use of Copilot at work because I found myself spending far too much time reviewing and correcting incorrect output from the model.

I also found many of the outputs, when accurate and correct, were just OK and simply not up to my professional standards. So much of my daily work requires communicating effectively through writing – explaining value and impact to leadership; acting as a translation layer between engineering, design and the business; and aligning stakeholders to broad, complex initiatives – all of which need to be buttoned-up to my highest standard. I’m simply not getting that quality from any AI model I’ve tried.

A Running List of Human-First Orgs

Last week I posted about the differentiation opportunity for companies and organizations who publicly lean into humanity and away from artificial intelligence. Since posting that, I’m starting to notice some examples of this in the real world.

I think it’s important to raise the visibility of Companies With Guts. Therefore, this post is will become an evolving list of organizations that take a public, pro-human, anti-AI stance. If you know of good examples, please share via email and I will update the list here ASAP.

Last updated 2026-01-21

On Superhumanity

Scott Belsky writes about the promise and vitality of ‘Superhumanity’ in a world that’s becoming ever-obsessed with artificial intelligence. Several of the ideas in this piece resonate with me.

First, I think Scott’s definition of taste as a combination of INPUTS, FILTERS and DISCERNMENTS is really smart. As AI evolves, humans will remain tastemakers. How we lean into the experiences we seek out (INPUTS), the things we actively choose to ignore (FILTERS) and the decisions we make (DISCERNMENTS) based on our inputs and filters will be the key to thriving in a post-AI world.

He rightly points out that establishing human taste will not be enough. We will need to activate our human agency to act upon our tastes. This often resembles – and in the post-AI world it should continue to resemble – audacity. Our human-centric audacity that we can achieve the impossible or be the first to accomplish something. AI can only know the past, but humans can envision a future.

I also thought his jazz-based approach to using AI is unique and worth considering:

You must engage AI with flexibility rather than having a fully formed sonata in your head and no willingness to deviate from it. You must discover the “instruments” AI is best at, and you must complement AI with what it lacks - your taste, agency, and natural human tendencies.

I highly recommend this piece, as well as Scott’s other writing, for anyone who thinks critically about technology and our human experience living with it.

Humanity as Differentiator

I just spent a few days in New York City at NRF 2026, the premier conference for the retail industry in the United States. For those unfamiliar, NRF is a behemoth – nearly 40,000 retail practitioners descending on the Javits Center each January.

My primary observation: AI wasn’t just present at this year’s event, it dominated everything. Every session. Every conversation. Every exhibitor pitch. Everything was presented through an AI lens. You couldn’t avoid it, even if you tried.

And I did.

NRF 2026 wasn’t billed as a “retail & AI” conference, but that’s exactly what it was. AI optimizing your supply chain. AI promising store operations efficiency. AI running wild on product catalogs to enable agentic shopping. Robots massaging data so websites are easier for other robots to navigate.

I wasn’t surprised by the saturation. Just look around. AI is being shoehorned into our daily interactions and companies are desperate to brand themselves as AI companies. The US economy is being propped up by AI investment, and retail is claiming its share.

What struck me was the opportunity cost.

In a landscape where every company fetishizes AI – in their products, in their operations, in their marketing – there’s a massive opening for companies brave enough to lean the other direction. Into humanity. Into the natural world. Into what makes us distinctly human.

I caught glimpses of this alternative path. Ryan Reynolds’ keynote touched on it. My friend Justin Weinstein’s talk about grocers serving their communities embodied it. But these were exceptions in a sea of sameness.

Here’s what I’m imagining: What if a company stood up and publicly declared they would resist artificial intelligence in their operations? What if they said instead they’d invest in people – the people who make the company work and the people the company serves? And what if they went all-in on this message in their marketing?

That decision would instantly differentiate them in a meaningful, substantive way.

The irony of everyone chasing the same AI strategy is that it eliminates competitive advantage. When everyone optimizes for the same thing, nobody stands out. But a company that deliberately chooses humanity over automation? Right now that’s an admirable decision and a signal customers can’t ignore.

I don’t know about you, but that’s the kind of company I’d get in line to support.

The Kindness Keeps Me Here

Sarah Samms Velázquez writes about finding unexpected kindness and a long-term home in Pittsburgh after years of wanderlust:

However, in an alleyway in Pittsburgh, I woke up to homemade soup, leftovers and even a camper-sized crockpot sitting on my truck’s bumper. In Pittsburgh, folks say hello and rarely turn their nose up at one another. In Northern Appalachia, we value the blue collar and the stories that come along with hard living; and do I have some stories to tell. I sometimes wonder where I’d be if I never found the Paris of Appalachia. Probably still searching, with a pack on my back – waiting for home to find me.

This is very similar to my own personal experience, although my journey to land in this city took place about 15 years prior to Sarah’s. I didn’t ride into town as a stowaway on a freight train (legendary!), but my arrival was in the cab of a broken-down tour van.

Pittsburgh is the kind of place where strangers look you in the eye. Where people help each other when there’s no benefit other than a thank you and smile. There’s an element of ‘realness’ here that I’ve found to be very different from most other cities. I think this realness can be distilled down to the kindness that Sarah writes so eloquently about in her piece.

That kindness is what keeps me here. And that kindness is what the world needs more of right now.

Welcome to the News Desert

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette will cease operations on May 3, 2026, leaving the region without a daily print news publication. The paper has been operating as the cornerstone of reliable media in the area for nearly 240 years. This is a massive blow to the news ecosystem here in Western Pennsylvania.

Block Communications Inc. communicated the decision to shutter the paper to employees via a pre-recorded video. This is a spineless, timid act that’s unfortunately par-for-the-course for the Block family who spent years fighting against the rights of PG workers only to lose that fight in the Supreme Court of the United States.

The announcement to cease operations on the immediate heels of the Supreme Court verdict reinforces that the Blocks believe there’s no point in maintaining a valuable asset for a community if they can’t exploit the workers who toil to create that asset.

Yes, the media landscape is shifting. The news business is difficult. Journalistic institutions are reeling. But we collectively have to find a way to keep journalism alive and accessible for communities. It’s one of the most important things we can do for our future.

User Error is a Myth

In a meeting earlier today, a colleague used the term user error. My ears perked up. After nearly twenty years building digital products, I’ve heard this phrase countless times and it never sits right.

This is how I’ve found it usually plays out: Someone uses our product in an unexpected way. Something breaks or doesn’t work like they thought it would. A product team member then asserts:

  • “They’re using it wrong.”
  • “The app isn’t designed to work that way.”
  • “They just need to tap this button first.”
  • “The software is functioning as designed.”

Next comes the verdict: user error. The person is making the mistake, not us. They need to adapt to our design, not the other way around.

This mindset is poison for great product work.

Every unexpected behavior, every “misuse,” every bug report from someone navigating our product differently than we imagined aren’t errors. They’re signals. They’re opportunities to learn about actual usage patterns, understand what people are really trying to accomplish, and iterate toward something better.

The phrase user error lets us off the hook too easily. It places blame on the person trying to get something done rather than on the system we designed. It assumes our mental model of how the product should work is the only valid one.

Users don’t care about our mental models. They care about their goals. If our product makes it easy to take a wrong turn, that’s a product problem, not a user problem.

There’s no such thing as user error. There’s only unwillingness to acknowledge that we might have gotten things wrong and a refusal to recognize opportunity to make things better.

Gearing up for NRF 2026

I’m looking forward to being back in New York City next week for NRF 2026. The big things on my radar this year are learning about ways to create progressive clienteling experiences for our customers, flexible & unified checkout technologies, and task management tools for store teams.

Also, I’m extremely keen to meet up with other people working in store tech product management at other retailers. If you’ll be at NRF and you’re interested in similar things or offer these types of services/products, let’s connect.

Also, also! The unofficial NRF Pittsburgh Steelers wild card watch party will be at Printer’s Alley on W 40th in Midtown on Monday night. I hate that I won’t be in the Steel City for this game, but the next best place to watch is at NYC’s Steeler Nation headquarters. Pack your Terrible Towel and swing by.

Pinnacle Pizza

We finally got a chance to taste John’s of Bleeker Street, after several attempts and refusals to queue around the block for pizza. So many people have told us that John’s is pinnacle pizza and yesterday we decided to see what the fuss was about.

I might be about to say something controversial:

It was a solid pie, but I found it to be just OK. The sauce was sweet and the crust was a bit flimsy for my liking. Above average for sure, but definitely not worth the hour-long wait in the rain.

There is better pizza in NYC, even in the Village. For my money, Joe’s Pizza around the corner on Carmine remains the best slice I’ve tasted anywhere.

A group of people are gathered outside John's Pizzeria, which has a red awning stating No Slices.

The Pennsylvanian

Amtrak 42, also known as The Pennsylvanian, runs from Pittsburgh to New York City. When possible, we love traveling by train. It’s a slower pace than flying and allows for taking in the passing landscapes in a way traveling by car does not.

A black and white photo of an Amtrak train car with visible windows and detailing is shown on a railway track.A snowy railway track runs through a wintery landscape with leafless trees.A person gazes out a train window at a snowy landscape with distant hills.A view through a train door window shows railway tracks and a station platform outside.

Product Thinking in Newsrooms

New to me: the News Product Alliance, a nonprofit that supports product professionals in newsrooms with the goal of elevating the product practice and expanding the diversity of product thinkers in decision-making roles at news organizations.

Our vision is to empower the news industry with a new generation of diverse leaders – News Product Thinkers – who have the empathy and know-how to build resilient news organizations, deliver quantifiable business results, and rebuild trust by ensuring we truly serve our communities.

This is a worthwhile cause. I hadn’t thought about how product thinking might play a role in the future of journalism, but it makes complete sense. Grounding media strategy in product foundations and understanding desirability, viability, feasibility and usability (through a constant lens of journalistic integrity) may just be a winning playbook to breathe much-needed life into the industry.

My Favorite Records of 2025

What a year it’s been for music! There have been so many awesome records released this year and it’s been extremely difficult narrowing this list down to my ten favorites. So hard, in fact, I’ve included five honorable mentions at the end. Please take no pretense or judgement in these choices, they are simply the albums released this calendar year that I connected with most. Without further ado and in no particular order, here are my favorite records of 2025.

Sunshine and Balance Beams by Pile

I know these are in no particular order, but this record may be favorite of the year. It’s definitely my most played record. The songwriting on this one is just impeccable. Pile brings an intensity and sharp edge to their performance, but the melodies and lyrics are just as solid as the musicality. They’ve been around for a long time, but this record was my gateway into their back catalog, which is also very good.

Glory by Perfume Genius

Glory is what happens when amazing musicianship meets smart & evocative songwriting meets unique production. Seriously, listen to this one with headphones. Not airbuds, but really good headphones. You will hear layers upon layers of dynamics that seem to surround in 360º. And the voice. It’s a thing of majesty.

Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party by Hayley Williams

I never got into Paramore. I think I just missed them when they were doing their thing back in the day. Williams was the frontwoman for that band, but I can’t really hear much Paramore influence in these songs. And these songs are fire. Eighteen of them and not one is a dud. My favorite track is True Believer. If you haven’t seen her performance of this song on Jimmy Fallon, check it out.

The Future is Here and Everything Needs to Be Destroyed by The Armed

This record is shot out of a cannon. One hundred miles an hour from start to finish. The Armed doesn’t have much in common with bands like Refused or At the Drive-In, but the first time I heard this record I had the same feeling I had when I heard The Shape of Punk to Come or In Casino Out back in the day. It feels like they’re earnestly pushing forward with something important and new with these songs.

Highwalllow & Supermoon Songs by Saintseneca

Have you ever had that weird feeling after you spin a new record for the first time and it feels like it’s one that’s been in your collection forever? Not it a trite or unoriginal way, but like when your nose catches a scent of something memorable from your past and transports you back there instantly, subconsciously. That’s what Highwalllow & Supermoon Songs feels like to me. It’s folky and yodely, but in a head-noddin’ way. Really beautiful mandolin & guitar melody lines layer themselves under shaky & pained vocals. There are some seriously great songs on this record.

Essex Honey by Blood Orange

I drove to the beach last September. It was a spur of the moment add-on to a work trip that had me in New Jersey anyway. The excursion to the shore was an occasion to meet up with some good friends from high school, who were all remarkably in town from disparate areas of the country for disparate reasons. The hang was spontaneous and real. There was 30 years of history among us. There were intoxicants. There was a seafood boil. There were memories. We shared laughs and tears. As the sunset brilliantly over the bay, someone put on this record and I lost my shit. It was the perfect vibe for that moment. Mellow, relaxed, orchestral. Deeply layered. Intense. Familiar but fresh. A fantastic record to enjoy with the ones you love.

SAYA by Saya Gray

There’s something about Saya Gray’s voice that I connect with. It has a unique texture. It’s rhythmic in a cool way. The songs on SAYA bring together acoustic artistry and digital production that create a sound that pulls you in and keeps you in from top to bottom. The melodies are wandering, from joyful to solemn, and they take you on a journey to someplace different from where you started listening.

Something to Consume by Die Spitz

It’s the year of our lord 2025, but the 90s are alive and well. The songs on this record from Die Spitz sound like they could have been performed on the stage at one of the early Lollapallooza tours. Simply put, these women shred and this record is one of my favorites released this year.

LOTTO by They Are Gutting a Body of Water

I don’t know much about They Are Gutting a Body of Water and I can’t remember how I heard about this record, but I love it. It’s so different. Some songs are noisy and experimental, some songs have hints of pop laced throughout. I hear something different each time I listen, and to me that’s the sign of a great record.

45 Pounds by YHWH Nailgun

This record is insane. I’ll admit, after Justin recommended it and I first listened, I wasn’t totally into it. But after a few more listens I was fully on board the YHWH Nailgun train. I’ve never heard anything like this before. Complex time signatures, guitar synth, roto toms and some of the most guttural/spastic vocals make for a truly unique sound.

Honorable Mention:

Freedom of Missing Out

The ringer was off, but the sudden vibration was jarring. It was the fourth such vibration in as many minutes. The buzzing phone, lying face down on my desk sent tremors through my forearms as those muscles powered keystrokes from my hands.

This particular notification was a mother on Adeline’s soccer team alerting the team chat app that her daughter wouldn’t be at training that evening. The three previous notifications included a retail store marketing an upcoming sale, a mention from Mastodon, and a text message from my health provider requesting feedback from a recent visit.

Four disruptions in four minutes, my phone had become an unforgiving foghorn. These four minutes were not a one-time exception. Never-ceasing notifications had become the rule – my reality – over time. Once deliberate and discerning with the tentacles I allowed to dictate my attention, my guard had eroded and they were slipping through like seepage.

I’m not sure what it was about these four notifications or this particular four minute window, but they created an awareness toward how these FOMO-driven flechettes have been impacting my presence with and focus on the tasks, ideas and people immediately before me. I noticed myself feeling splintered in this moment. Pulled apart. Traction lost.

In this instant of self realization, I opened the settings on my phone, disabled all notifications except for text messages and phone calls from my immediate family, and saved these changes as a custom focus option I now call Mental Hygiene. This has been my default in recent weeks and it’s improved my quality of life greatly.

FOMO – or fear of missing out – is an interesting cultural abstraction. Technology has conditioned us for speed, constant reachability and the need to always be aware of the latest updates, otherwise we’re left behind.

But filtering out unwanted noise is not being left behind. It is prioritizing attention on what matters. It’s protecting a level of focus that becomes rarer with each new notification and version update.

We should not fear of missing out. Instead, let’s normalize a freedom of missing out. A freedom to let the insignificant and immaterial slide into the ether unnoticed. A freedom to be bored or reflective. A freedom that honors stillness and slowness. A freedom that empowers a focused mind, time spent with meaning, and whole presence in any given moment.

Old Graybeard Strikes Again

Yesterday I laced up my running shoes and toed the line at the Nittany Valley Half Marathon. It was my first race since March 2024 and I was very intrigued to find out if these old bones still had some race left in them. Turns out, they do and I’m stoked on my performance.

Before we get into the race itself, a bit about why I chose to run this particular event. You may remember that my son is a first year student at Penn State. Well, the start and finish line for the Nittany Valley Half is basically across the street from his dorm, so this was really just a great excuse for me to get up early, drive a few hours to University Park, run 13.1 miles, watch the Steelers game with him over an extended lunch, and then drive home. It turned out to be the perfect day.

When I signed up for the race back in October, I had no expectations for pace or time. I just wanted a goal & event to strive for that might help me get back into a training regimen. As I stood at the starting line yesterday, I reaffirmed to myself that there were no expectations and I gave myself permission to run strong & run with curiosity.

The airhorn sounded and we were off. The big dawgs took off and quickly separated themselves from everyone, probably running sub-6 pace. This wasn’t my first rodeo, so I knew the importance of not starting off too fast. I settled into a comfortable 8:30 min/mile pace and felt great over the first mile. I maintained that pace over the first 5k and felt I could drop the hammer some more, but remembered there were still 10 miles to go, so I stayed solid at 8:30 min/mile.

I ran miles 4 to 7 with a young kid, who couldn’t have been older than 15. Must’ve been his first race because his family and friends seemed to be following him throughout those miles, cheering on teenager Adam at each opportunity. He started sucking wind between six & seven (see what I did there?) so I dropped him. Hope the young buck finished strong.

I started to feel some fatigue between mile 7, and wondered if may have gone out too fast. This course saves the hills for the final few miles and I decided to go big or go home on the first significant climb at mile 9. Being a trail runner, I think the hills are where I tend to shine. I’m not the fastest on the flats or downhills, but I can crush a 10% incline. So I went for it on the mile 9 climb and picked off about 10 runners struggling with the elevation.

As I neared the top, legs burning & lungs pulsing, I questioned what I had done. I was really feeling it with 5k left. Cresting the hill, I saw the semblance of an angel. This angel took the form of a woman working an unofficial aid station, handing out orange slices to runners. Yes! Just what I needed to power me through the last 5k. I dipped my hand into her Tupperware and retrieved the glory.

Four mandarin wedges and I was back to life.

By mile 11, I started picking up the pace into the sevens. I knew there was one major climb left at mile 12 that could be my opportunity to jump some more places. I was right. The course gains about 200 feet of elevation over the last mile. That’s nothing for a trail runner, so I turned it on and must’ve picked off nearly 20 runners on that climb. The most memorable moment of the race for me came at the top of that final climb, when a course official yelled out, “Hell yeah graybeard! Crushin’ it! Way to go!”

Approaching the finish, I spotted my son in the crowd and got to give him a fist-bump as I approached the line.

I crossed the finish line with an official time of 1 hour, 45 minutes and 8 seconds – which translates to an overall pace of 8:07. Having had no expectations at the start, I’m super happy and proud of this effort, particularly being able to run based on feel and finish strong.

On Snow Days and Simple Joy

We got about four inches of snow overnight and the roads are awful so it’s a snow day – er, “flexible instruction” day – for my youngest. Instead of being outside sledding, building a snow man or working with the neighborhood kids to create an igloo, she will be tethered to her iPad taking Zoom calls with her classmates and teacher for the majority of the day.

Of course we’ll make some time to get outdoors and do a few of those things today, but I’m sad that this generation of kids will never wake up to the unexpected magic of a true snow day. That elation when you open your eyes in the morning and look out the window to see a white blanket covering everything and learning that school is closed. The whole day ahead with anything possible.

Simple joys like this are receding from childhood and I’m not sure the digital equivalent is comparable. As parents, we should work to keep simple joy in the lives of our children.

This Old Brown Belt

I’ve only ever owned one belt. It’s an unremarkable belt. Brown leather, about two inches wide with a weighty, minimal brass buckle. I wear it with everything. Brown pants, black pants, blue jeans, whatever. I even have a couple pairs of shorts with belt loops and I wear it with them.

I used to be a bit heavier. When I started running a lot about 10 years ago, the weight poured off and I ran out of holes on the belt. Instead of getting a new one, I just punched a couple more holes into the worn leather and kept on wearing it. I’m not sure why I didn’t go get a new belt. I just didn’t think to.

Getting dressed yesterday it dawned on me that I can’t remember when or where this belt entered my life. I have absolutely no recollection of acquiring it. If I had to guess, it’s probably a belt my mother purchased for me during one of her back-to-school outfitting sessions when I was a teen. So, middle school school probably.

Definitely longer than my kids have been around. Longer than I’ve known my wife.

It’s a versatile belt. My style has evolved over the decades from adolescent punk rocker to middle-aged professional and this belt has ridden my hips the whole way. It serves casual and formal situations alike.

I think about this belt sometimes when I’m standing in a store surrounded by things that are designed to be replaced. There’s something radical about an object that refuses obsolescence by simply continuing to work.

This belt has disappeared into total utility, earning the right to become invisible yet so integrated into my life. I forget it’s there, but can’t imagine a life without it.

Employee-Facing Apps Don't Need to Suck

I’ve been heads down at work for the past several weeks rolling out a significant operational change (supported by new technology) to a segment of pilot stores in our retail fleet. This rollout required me to visit stores on both coasts listening for feedback, observing things that need to be improved and iterating quickly to deliver value in near-realtime. It’s been invigorating and has brought back to the surface all the elements I love about product management as a practice!

Ultimately, the problem space we’re operating in is this: How might we make the products in our stores easier to find for our employees and our customers?

The big change we are attempting to deliver is the introduction of product location data in-store. It’s a big, gnarly problem to solve for a legacy co-op like REI, mainly due to the extreme variability in our store layouts. If you’ve been to more than one REI, you know that some locations are in historical buildings – an old train station in Denver, for example – while others inherit a simpler big-box & strip mall retail feel. This variability in warehouse size & organization, combined with diverse floor sets across markets, create complexities that make standardizing a process and delivering tech that works across all locations extremely difficult.

One store workflow this new product location data will help improve is the sales floor restocking process. For the first time at REI, we know how many units of a SKU are on the sales floor, how many units are in the warehouse, and where those units are in the store. My team is also ingesting several data elements from our Visual Merchandising team and we wrote a machine learning algorithm to forecast a Target Sales Floor Quantity for every SKU in the store.

So with the raw location data and the algorithm telling us what should be on the sales floor, we were able to develop a new restocking tool in REI’s employee mobile app (Ascent) that is centered around one key hero metric: Sales Floor Percent Stocked. Store employees can now get a real-time snapshot of their sales floor stocked rate, along with a prioritized list of products that need to be restocked, on their mobile devices. This is a big step forward for our store teams.

One of the things I’m most proud of related to this pilot rollout is the feedback we’re getting from users about the Ascent features. Because we lean into co-creation mindset, the product team was able to deliver an initial version that delighted store teams out of the gate and we continue to iterate as we learn more about usage. The Ascent team obsesses over quality and store employee experience, and I think that’s evident in the product we deliver. I mean, tell me this is not one of the most elegant employee-facing app interfaces you’ve ever seen.

A series of 4 mobile app mockups

Employee-facing apps don’t need to suck. The Ascent team is lean: 1 front-end engineer, 1 back-end engineer, 1 QA analyst, shared product designer, shared product manager (me). The lean-ness of the team presents some hurdles, but it also affords us the ability to take both an an agile approach that prioritizes speed-to-market and an artisanal approach that prioritizes craft. I believe this mode of operating is our sweet spot.

As we enter REI’s holiday code freeze, we’ll be hands off on production changes but we’ll be working hard behind the scenes on the next version of Ascent (ETA January) that will power location data enablement across the enterprise.

A Fully-Present Participant in Reality

I’ve been thinking a lot about attention. My attention, primarily, but also our collective attention and where we direct it in the world.

Like time, attention is a finite resource. But unlike time, we can never run out of attention. There is a never-ending supply until we breathe our last breath. The rub with attention, however, is that even though we have an unending supply, we can only ever fully dedicate it to one thing at one time. This creates a distinctly different scarcity from time. Where time has a scarcity of depletion, attention has a scarcity of distribution.

In every moment, we make attention-allocation decisions. These decisions require active engagement with the world around us. Our reality. You can’t save attention for later. You can’t bank it or invest it or set it aside. You can only practice directing it more intentionally in each moment.

Our world is now designed to make these decisions of direction for us. The notification that pulls us away from conversation. The infinite scrolling that captures twenty minutes we didn’t intend to give. The autoplay that queues up the next video before we’ve processed the current one.

Our world has evolved to be hungry for attention. It’s the capital of our modern times. It wants to train our attention into patterns. It wants to colonize the practice of attention itself, to make fragmentation feel normal.

What if we approached attention differently? Not as a resource to be managed or extracted, but as a practice to be cultivated? What if we chose the here and now over the distant and digital? What would change if our attention was not an opportunity to monetize, but an opportunity to be fully here in this moment?

Being fully present means making intentional choices about where attention goes. Let’s choose to pay attention to the things that help us become fully-present participants in our shared reality.

An Open Letter to Shaler Area School District

The following is an open letter to Shaler Area School District superintendent Bryan O’Black and the district’s board of directors regarding the closure and eventual sale of Shaler Area Elementary School. It was delivered via email on Tuesday, September 30, 2025, but I am posting here for transparency and in case anyone else from the community wants to send a similar note. Feel free to use this as a template for your own communication.

TO: oblackb@shalerarea.org, tunstallj@shalerarea.org, phillipse@shalerarea.org, dunne@shalerarea.org, burnj@shalerarea.org, kresse@shalerarea.org, machajewskij@shalerarea.org, petrancostad@shalerarea.org, kwiatkowskia@shalerarea.org, saullet@shalerarea.org, tresslerj@shalerarea.org
FROM: jeffrey@inscho.org
RE: Community Forum Follow-Up

Dr. O’Black and SASD Board Directors —

[Redacted first paragraph with personal identifiable information]

Thank you for sharing the information about the transition to a K-5 elementary education model at last evening’s Community Forum. I appreciate the transparency and vulnerability as you addressed questions from a naturally emotional audience.

I personally support this educational recommendation for the students of the district.

My wife and I are concerned, however, about the future of the SAES property. My home is one of approximately 30 residences that abut the SAES grounds, and one of more than one hundred within a quarter mile radius of the school.

As you know, the 22 acres upon which the school stands provides a lot of benefit for neighbors and the surrounding community. People gather, practice athletics, exercise, socialize and grow relationships with their neighbors on those grounds every day. I want to ensure some aspect of that remains when SAES is gone, while also generating much needed funds for the district to reinvest in our children’s future.

My intent with this note is not to add to the emotional responses, but recommend the board take a measured and thoughtful approach when considering the sale of the property. This may include:

  • Adding a work stream for the responsible sale of SAES property. I think the work stream approach for the transition is smart and I’ve seen this be effective in private sector change management. Unless I missed it in the presentation last evening, there is not currently a work stream identified for the sale of the property. I recommend that one be created, noting the impact to hundreds of families in close proximity to SAES.
  • Engaging neighbors for feedback and vetting of potential buyers. The sale of the Jeffery Elementary property several years ago set a precedent for the district’s active collaboration with community to facilitate a real estate transaction. I recommend a steering committee of neighbors be engaged to help identify viable & appropriate buyers for the land under shared goals of creating a lucrative sale for the district and a community-based plan for the property’s future.

I am willing, able and interested to volunteer or partner in any capacity to help make this a win/win for the district and the Scott Avenue community the district serves. Thanks again for the openness.

Respectfully,
Jeffrey Inscho

Connectivity Isn't Connection

The WiFi unexpectedly went out at my house last Friday. It was completely random — working fine one minute, then zero connectivity the next. I restarted my router a few times and checked all my connections. No luck. I couldn’t spend much time troubleshooting because I was on a deadline for work, so I left the house and worked the remainder of the day from a neighborhood coffee shop.

The technical issue that brought down the WiFi isn’t important. What’s important is that it was something I couldn’t fix myself and the provider needed to send out a technician to resolve it. The extra-important part is that they couldn’t put us on the schedule until the following Tuesday. This meant we’d have no internet at home for five days.

As an elder millennial, the thought of an offline extended weekend excited me. I remember well, and often long for, pre-internet living. This wasn’t the case for my 13-year-old who lives on YouTube or my 18-year-old ESPN freak who was on his way home from Penn State (they were on a bye) to visit for the weekend.

What transpired over those few offline days was special. Yes, our phones still had cellular connections, so we weren’t completely disconnected. But lack of WiFi meant our laptops remained closed, our tablets untouched, and our smart TVs dark.

Instead, we spent quality time together, mostly outside. We built a fire. We made margaritas. We took a few family walks with the dog. We cooked a Sunday football feast and watched the game using an antenna. We looked each other in the eye as we talked, and it was nice.

Those five days reinforced for me that life feels richer when I’m not constantly plugged in. Sometimes absence can create space for much needed presence. When Tuesday came and the technician completed his work, I was almost reluctant to reconnect because I now realize the connectivity I’d been missing wasn’t the WiFi at all.