The Workshop Manifesto: Why I Teach Stuff That Isn't (Strictly) Code
We need to talk about the “Senior Engineer Trap.”
You know the one. You spend 10 years getting really, really good at moving bytes from point A to point B. You master K8s. You dream in Rust. You optimize your ZSH config until it’s sentient.
And then one day you wake up at 3 AM, staring at a failing CI pipeline, and you realize: “Is this it? Is my legacy just a pile of YAML files?”
I hit that wall. Hard. I was working at a Big Tech Company (let’s call it “Amznflix”), optimizing ad-serving latency by microseconds, and my soul was slowly leaking out of my ears.
So I did something weird. I started analyzing myself with the same rigor I analyzed my code. I started meditated. I started making art that served no “business value.” I started coding for music instead of profit.
And it saved my life.
Now, I teach these workshops not because I want to sell you a course, but because I wish someone had grabbed me by the shoulders 5 years ago and shook me until I listened.
These aren’t your standard “Introduction to Python” bootcamps. These are survival guides for the modern human who happens to love technology but hates what it’s doing to their brain.
The Curriculum for the Recovering Technologist
🧘 Basic Meditation: Debugging Your Brain
6 weeks | For the Overclocked Mind
Your brain is a legacy codebase. It has race conditions (anxiety), memory leaks (distraction), and infinite loops (rumination). You can’t just rm -rf bad thoughts.
In this workshop, we treat meditation as cognitive refactoring. We learn to attach a debugger to your own awareness. It’s not about “clearing your mind” (that’s impossible, don’t try). It’s about getting improved observability on your own mental state.
🎵 Ableton + Sonic Pi: Live Coding for People Who Hate GUIs
8 sessions | For the Musical Hacker
Using a mouse to make music is like painting with a brick. It works, but it feels wrong.
We combine Sonic Pi (Ruby-based live coding) with Ableton Live (the industry standard DAW). You write code to generate the patterns, and use Ableton to make them sound like actual music instead of a jagged sine wave. It’s “hybrid performance,” which is fancy talk for “I look like I’m hacking the Pentagon but actually I’m dropping the bass.”
🎨 TouchDesigner: The Matrix is Real and You Can Edit It
12 sessions | Visual Programming
TouchDesigner is what happens when you turn a flowchart into a psychedelic experience. It’s node-based visual programming.
If you’ve ever wanted to make an art installation that reacts to a dancer’s heartbeat, or a visual system that tracks your face and turns it into a glitch-art masterpiece, this is it. It’s complex, it’s powerful, and it crashes less than my JavaScript projects.
🌀 Algorithms as Code: Art for Left-Brained People
8 sessions | Generative Art
“I’m not creative,” says the developer who just architected a 50-microservice distributed system. Lie. You are creative, you just need different brushes.
We use p5.js to paint with math. Loops, recursion, chaos theory. We study the old masters (Vera Molnár, Casey Reas) and steal their secrets. It’s about moving from “optimizing for speed” to “optimizing for beauty.”
🖌️ Conscious Art Making: Stop Judging Yourself
6 sessions | Anti-Perfectionism
This is the scariest workshop I teach. There is no code. There is no Cmd-Z. Just paint, paper, and your own crippling fear of making something “ugly.”
We use mindfulness to bypass the Inner Critic—that voice that says “My 5-year-old could do that.” Spoiler: Your 5-year-old was probably a better artist than you are now because they didn’t care about being “good.”
🌍 Conscious Consumerism: Stopping the Amazon IV Drip
8 sessions | Sustainability
“I’ll be happy when I buy the new M5 MacBook.” (Narrator: He was not happy.)
We use Integral Theory and Shadow Work to understand why we buy things we don’t need to impress people we don’t like. It’s about fixing the hole in the soul that we try to fill with Prime delivery boxes.
Unsubscribe from the dopamine loop →
💻 The Conscious Coder: Hardware that actually helps
8 sessions | IoT with a Conscience
Most IoT is garbage. “Smart Toasters” that mine Bitcoin? No thanks.
We use the micro:bit to build systems that actually connect us to nature. Soil moisture sensors. Automated watering. Systems that serve life instead of extracting data. It’s engineering with ethics built in at the compiler level.
📅 Conscious Planning: GTD for the Soul
8 sessions | Life Design
Your To-Do list is a graveyard of good intentions. We used Integral Theory (AQAL) to rebuild how you plan your life. Not “how to squeeze 5% more productivity,” but “why am I doing this in the first place?”
Logistical Details (The Boring Stuff)
- Money: I use sliding scale pricing. If you’re a standard tech worker making tech conceptual salary, pay full price. If you’re a student or underemployed, pay less. I trust you. Don’t be a jerk.
- Location: Brooklyn (Real Life) or Zoom (The Metaverse).
- Format: Small cohorts. I don’t do massive webinars. I want to actually know who you are.
A Final Rant
You don’t need another certification. You don’t need to learn another JS framework (it’ll change next week anyway).
You need to learn how to be a human being who uses technology, rather than a meat-peripheral attached to a keyboard.
Pick a workshop. Let’s make something weird together.
(No agents, recruiters, or people trying to sell me SEO services. Please.)