Things I'm Learning

08-21-2026

Thought it would be cool to document some things I’d like to focus on in the next few months (or years). These are just my personal learning endeavors for future me and the 1 or 2 people who might stumble upon this post. If you share any of the same general interests, please feel free to reach out! I love to meet new people and share ideas/connect.

Jazz Guitar

I started playing guitar in 5th grade, and over the last 30 years I’ve definitely had quite a few years of nothing, but have been at it for quite some time. A few years ago I wanted to take the learning process more seriously and have been taking jazz guitar lessons. Some days I feel happy with where I’m at, other days it feels like I haven’t learned anything at all.

This is something that I am hoping is a lifelong endeavor. Every guitarist is self-deprecating, but there is a great deal of satisfaction when making even the smallest amount of progress. It’s like chasing performance gains in the software world, where hardly anyone will appreciate the amount of effort except for the person doing the hard work. Both pursuits are also just fun! (most of the time)

Just like most performance optimizations, learning jazz guitar has nearly no fiscal benefit, certainly not for me. This is another appealing aspect for me - a small way of rebelling against capitalism and feeling the need to be endlessly chasing some goal that relates to money or status. It’s really not that deep, but it is something that I think about.

This post by Winnie Lim is very honest and I can relate to much of what’s said. Jazz music is indescribable and can stir up all kinds of emotions. It can sound whimsical, happy, bizarre, and sad. It is rooted in tradition and rebellion, and I honestly think that anyone can find some flavor of jazz that speaks to them.

My guitar teacher Dan lives 10 minutes away, and whenever I walk to his place for a lesson, I pass by this Sun Ra mural, In the Orbit of Ra, that was recently painted by artists Ernel Martinez and Keir Johnston. It is just so cool and I love seeing it.

Mural titled In the Orbit of Ra by Ernel Martinez and Keir Johnston

What I’ve Learned So Far

  • Practicing something frequently really does make your recall and understanding exponentially better. There are so many analogies between practicing an instrument and offloading the act of writing code to LLMs, but I will save that for when my soapbox is back from the repair shop.
  • Re: the above - persistence is paramount. If you suck at something and want to be better, do it often.
  • Staying focused is hard. How many times should I keep practicing scales and arpeggios? The answer is that there isn’t a maximum amount of times, it is always N+1.

Meditation

Since August 2025, I have been meditating (almost) every day with the exception of a handful of days where I was sick, and a few times where I was just overwhelmed and wasn’t able to follow through. Doing nothing is hard! This is an entire philosophy and something that I’m grateful to have incorporated into my life.

There are so many resources to learn from and just like jazz, there is a constant nagging feeling that I’m just not getting something, or not doing something right. The more I write and work out my thoughts, the more I see this pattern. Is it something I like because I like challenges? Or is it something that scares me and I like the feeling of pushing through it? It’s probably both.

Some of my favorite books about Zen Meditation so far are:

At some point I’d like to go beyond reading and find a teacher to connect with in person. I only have excuses as to why I haven’t taken that step!

What I’ve Learned So Far

  • Like jazz, persistence pays off.
  • There is no “right” way.
  • Thoughts come and go so frequently and we all tend to overvalue the weight of a fleeting thought.

Postgres + Ebean

We use these together at work. Ebean is an ORM and postgres is postgres. I have been using these for the past 2+ years and have an intermediate understanding of both, but just like meditation and jazz guitar, you can go very deep into understanding database design and tuning queries with ORMs.

Learning about both of these have their own challenges - postgres is ubiquitous and there are a zillion resources out there to choose from, and countless concepts to learn about. Ebean is pretty niche, as most Java shops prefer Spring or other ORMs, and there is pretty sparse documentation.

To hold myself accountable, I am planning on writing some more technical posts about what I learn about these two so I’ll keep this section brief.

My favorite part of ebean is that they set up a Threadless shop. I see a hoodie in my future.

What I’ve Learned So Far