What I'm up to - November 2026

Hello again, and welcome back to my monthly newsletter. Last month, I tried writing more of a prosaic update, and I enjoyed it - so I am continuing that style here.

I am currently back in Brooklyn, having just returned from the F1 race in Mexico City. This was my first time attending an F1 race in person, and it was a lot of fun. I was surprised by how close the audience is to the track, and how much of the noise is not the engines - but air whooshing around the cars as they punch through. It ended up being an engaging race with a red flag, safety car, and Kimi becoming world champion. I am slowly publishing photos on Tidbits.

The night before the race, I had a surprise as Nico Hulkenberg walked into the restaurant where I was having dinner and sat across from me. He proceeded to have two glasses of wine with his food, and it had me wondering about racing performance - was drinking the night before an athletic event, at 2.2 km in altitude, really a good idea? Alas, he received a 10-second time penalty and had a bad weekend. I blame the wine.

It was interesting being back in Mexico City. When I left SF to travel nine years ago, I started with four months in Mexico City and have continued to go back every year or so. Over time, the city has changed so much - many of my favorite restaurants and cafes have closed, and the sidewalks have notably more Americans. I was surprised on a walk around Parque México to stumble upon a La Cabra Coffee being constructed.

A highlight of the trip was stopping by Green Rhino, a new bakery by Richard Hart. I have had Richard's baking when he worked at Tartine, then Hart Bageri. And, I also enjoyed his recent book focused on "intuitive" breadmaking. Last year on a bit of a whim he moved from Copenhagen to Mexico City and opened this bakery. The pastries were delicious - especially the poblano cheese croissant. I got to chat with him for a few minutes, which was fun. (Apparently, bread ferments much faster in CDMX due to the altitude.)

The other big event last month was moving into my new home in Brooklyn's Boerum Hill. It has been a slow process of unpacking, organizing, tweaking, designing, and shopping. I think we will not be fully settled until the end of the year - it always surprises me how slow things like furniture take to arrive. This is also my first time owning a place, so the agency has been fun - I can just add a new power outlet or change a light fixture. I have a feeling that living here will be a never-ending project.

I have not shared a professional update since leaving Chroma in June. Replit just announced the acquisition of the company last week, and I am happy for their landing. Sadly, the Chroma Cloud product I worked on for many years is shutting down.

Contrary to what my friends think, I have not been on vacation since leaving Chroma. I am now on my fourth month of working on the engineering team at Stripe. Stripe is a company I have long admired. I first used them at Staffjoy to accept payments, then built Moonlight on top of Stripe Connect and was an early user of a Corporate Card product. Then, at Chroma I implemented Stripe Projects and presented at Stripe Sessions. Stripe is a company whose values I align with, ranging from a focus on craft and quality, to owning a book publishing arm and economics magazine (and even sponsoring a decent F1 team). I have thoroughly enjoyed my time there so far. This is the largest company I have ever worked at (besides the two weeks I spent at Cisco post-acquisition), and I have been learning a lot from the team - it really has a great culture. (As an aside, this talk by Stripe's Katie Dill on designing with AI is worth a watch.)

Stripe has a culture of "friction logging" - trying a product and taking notes on it along the way. So, I set up Stripe on this website. On my photo blogs, I added the ability to purchase the original unedited RAW photo and a high-resolution edit of the final photo for $3 apiece. I did it with Stripe's new Managed Payments feature, which greatly simplifies taxes and compliance. It was a fun process, and the notes I took while implementing are resulting in improvements to the products already.

So, that is a summary of what I have been up to. If you are looking for something to listen to, I recommend the Kitchen Confidential audiobook, narrated by Bourdain himself. For gear, I am excited to try Craig Mod's new notebook which just arrived in the mail. I have not had much time to work on my website, but I consolidated the Contraption and Workshop newsletters to just Workshop, which is a name I love. And, I finished posting some photos from Copenhagen on Tidbits.