Fall 2025 | Impactful Articles

The first time you opened Spotify Wrapped, it felt like an intimate gift. It was the cohesive playlist to your life in the last year. When you shared the graphic of your top five songs to Instagram, you were showing your friends the journey you went through.

Now, every mundane app thinks it deserves a victory lap. Year-end reviews have become a form of digital spam. To avoid adding to that noise, in this inaugural recap of my “most impactful” articles, I won’t dump everything that I enjoyed (that rolling dump can be found here). This is more of a record of utility.

These are the specific articles that caused me to tangibly change my behavior. If a piece of writing didn't result in a new action, it didn't make the cut.

Maybe the Default Settings Are Too High by David Cain
Rushing through a story to reach the climax is a losing trade that numbs your enjoyment. When you slow down enough to let a clearer signal overcome the noise of impatience, you can start to appreciate the depth of what you consume.

Impact: Anh and I read this article write before getting brunch together at one of our favorite spots. With it top of mind, we ate slower than usual. Maybe it was placebo, but I really felt that the food tasted better.

after my dad died, we found the love letters by Jenn
A daughter finds her late father's love letters and realizes the man she knew was a hollow performance. He lived a secret life of genuine joy with a male lover while using a miserable, forty year marriage as a social shield.

Impact: Without giving too much away (yet), this article made me adjust certain performative aspects of my workplace demeanor and career goals.

Simplify Your Code: Functional Core, Imperative Shell by Arham Jain
Stop mixing the business logic within the “imperative shell”.

Impact: This changed less of how I wrote code, and more of exposing more of the functional core for reuse on the client-side.