Off the clock
The professional Jesse lives on the home page. This is the rest.
Hip-hop
In rotation right now (no skips):
- Baby Keem — "Casino." The ad-libs alone justify the listen.
- Drake — "ICE MAN." He still goes off when he wants to.
- Dave — whatever he just dropped. UK drill meets storytelling. The lyricism is absurd.
- IDK × J. Cole — "Bravado." Two-disc format, zero filler. The structure is a flex before the first track starts.
- NxWorries — Why Lawd? Knxwledge + Anderson .Paak is a cheat code. Every song sounds like a Sunday morning.
Standup comedy
The tier list (not negotiable):
The GOATs: George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Dave Chappelle
The closers: Chris Rock, Louis CK, Katt Williams
The ones you recommend first: Andrew Schulz, Ricky Gervais, Mark Norman, Jay Leno
The ranking debate is the point. Don't @ me.
Breakfast burritos
I built a rating system. Five weighted categories:
- Price-to-quality ratio — Are you getting what you paid for, and do you leave satisfied — not stuffed?
- Ingredient quantity — Is everything there, in the right amount, with nothing in excess?
- Distribution — Does every bite have everything, or do you hit a potato void in the last third?
- First bite — Does it hit? Protocol: first bite without salsa. Second bite with. Both have to land.
- Adaptability — Can you build your burrito, or is the menu a suggestion?
The ideal execution: 2-3 scrambled eggs, crispy chopped bacon, tater tots (hashbrowns are second tier, we don't negotiate this), Mexican tri-blend, diced tomatoes, sliced avocado, green salsa or garlic aioli.
Still looking for the 10. The hunt continues.
Reading I keep coming back to
- The Fountainhead + Atlas Shrugged — Ayn Rand. The philosophy is divisive. The characters are insufferable. The commitment to individual agency hits different when you're building something alone.
- The Obstacle Is the Way — Ryan Holiday. Stoicism in a format you'll actually finish.
- As a Man Thinketh — James Allen. 63 pages. Read in an afternoon. Think about for years.
- Harry Potter — The full series. The world-building is unmatched and I don't care what that says about me.
One weird thing
Learning to ship software with almost no traditional coding background — just email marketing experience, a lot of Claude, and a low tolerance for things not working.
Most people treat "non-technical" like a limitation. I treat it like a forcing function: if I can't explain what I want to build in plain English, I don't understand it well enough to build it yet. That constraint has made me a better problem-framer than most engineers I know.
This page updates whenever I have something worth saying. No cadence — if it sits unchanged for months, the picks were good.