For some people it's the beach, for some people it's the mountains, but for me the best part of summer is the fruit. I get irrationally excited about finding and harvesting fruit.

You might not think of Alberta as the best fruit growing region on the planet but it is. “But Brendan!”, you might interject, BC has the Okanagan and it's bountiful peaches and other tree fruit. California grows literally everything. France is the worlds epicenter for red grapes.

But no! Alberta and the rest of the Canadian prairie provinces are the world's largest cultivators of the world's best fruit: the saskatoon! You know it's the best fruit because we have the largest city in the world that is named as a fruit in Saskatchewan; Saskatoon with a population of 352,000. (Tangier which is larger gave its name to the tangerine instead of taking its name from the fruit).

For those of you who have never tried one, a saskatoon tastes like no other fruit, it is a smallish berry that kind of looks like a blueberry but it grows on a bush that grows up to 5m tall (if you can call a 5m tall tree a bush!). The taste is a tangy, nutty sweetness with differences between varieties.

The best part of it though is the visceral bliss of pulling down a branch, grabbing a bunch of saskatoons that are balloons ready to pop, having them burst in my hands staining them, and then throwing them into my mouth to savour their juicy flesh.

Nordegg to Rocky Mountain House

The heights of the Rockies towered over us as we paddled down the North Saskatchewan before throwing us (literally, we swamped three canoes) through “The Gap” to the foothills. There, we camped along Devil’s Elbow, a 250m wave train. We decided to run it. The first was a roaring success. The second canoe, my canoe, wasn’t so lucky. We smashed into the biggest rapid straight on, took on half a boat of water and then decided we could paddle through the rest of the waves. Well, we kept paddling, just without a canoe...

Building software businesses

There are a few non-technical entrepreneurs that have started stitching together various vibecoding tools, open-source software and workflow builders (like zapier and n8n) into real businesses. But that's not accessible to all the people that could be building phenomenal businesses or solving problems in their existing businesses. Every company will soon be a software company.

There is so much repetitive work that people do as part of their everyday jobs that they should be able to automate. That work is not unique to them, other people in that industry and they have deep expertise in their industry; professionals know the pain points and have great networks that they could sell to. They would be excellent entrepreneurs.

It shouldn't take a rocket surgeon to scrape some data that someone needs every week. Or have a form that validates the entry and routes users to the right place. Or have a form that must be submitted (by law!) to be first screened by an AI system to decrease the time to first feedback for a respondent or to triage high-risk cases for regulatory compliance.

But the reaction of most people isn't: Is there a better way to do this? It's to push through and follow the process.

Oftentimes the answer is software, that's why Software as a Service has powered the growth of the technology industry for the past 15 years. I want there to be more software in the world and I want more people to make tools that lets everyday people build software.

Success

I find it so seductive to use other people’s benchmarks for what I define as success.

Do I have a nice house? Am I making more money that other people (this is embarrassing, but it is shocking how much time I’ve spent looking at income percentiles for various places) Do people around me understand and value what I am doing? Is my job high status? Do my peers view me as high status? As competent?

My aunt and uncle were talking about what convinced them to get a dog and it was my cousin saying: “seven smiles a day”. What my cousin meant by this is that getting a dog will put a smile on your face an extra seven times every day.

I have never made a decision by how many smiles I would earn from it. That’s not how adults talk about a successful outcome. It’s how kids do. Maybe the kids are right.

I’m still working out what it means to live my life to the fullest with my eyes open to the fact that there a trade-offs to what I can possibly pursue and nuances to what success feels like that will be difficult if not impossible to articulate.

Love

My nephew was born, I love him.

Media

The Electric Slide

The electric slide is a history of electrical exponential technologies: microcontrollers, power electronics and batteries. It really drives home the weirdness of how these unlock new applications that were not possible before and how these applications (like drones) seemingly come out of nowhere.

The fundamental observation is that technologies compound in a similar way to compound interest. The improvement in performance of a technology leads to a new base from which other technologies can build off of and also cross-polinates other inventions. That base continually grows and those results are multiplicative instead of additive leading to crazy growth curves instead of linear increases.

Blackberry Eating - Galway Kinney

I felt compelled to buy a poetry book late last year and I thumbed through a few but I was sucked into Galway Kinney’s Collected Poems. I opened the book to his poem First Day of the Future sucked me in and I have continued to be enthralled by his writing.

Blackberry Eating one is my favourite of his and encapsulates how I feel about Saskatoon picking. (Blackberries are also fantastic)

I love to go out in late September

among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries

to eat blackberries for breakfast,

the stalks very prickly, a penalty

they earn for knowing the black art

of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them

lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries

fall almost unbidden to my tongue,

as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words

like strengths and squinched,

many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,

which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well

in the silent, startled, icy, black language

of blackberry-eating in late September.

At Folsom Prison - Johnny Cash

Just a fantastic live album, the best is 25 minutes to go but you should listen end to end. It's both hilarious and gut wrenching to deeply humanize the people that he is performing for.

The laughter helps me empathize with the prisoners whose lives are no longer theirs. I could've been born into a situation whose default path led to that. I'm grateful I was not, but those prisoners weren't so lucky. I think it's worth thinking as those people as humans that deserve love, care and compassion.

Video

I love the movement of the clouds as the wonder tumbles below me. The shadows the clouds cast over the lake and the glacier give a delicious depth to the scene.

Request

I’m curious what you think of living a successful life. How do you (or do you at all) define success in your life? Are you currently succeeding? How did you decide that was what success was for you?

Figuring life out

I left my job at Yuma in May. Yuma is the most inspiring place I have ever worked. I’m grateful to everyone that I worked with for their devotion to building something truly great and Guillaume and Hector in particular for pushing me to be the most ambitious version of myself, however uncomfortable that was.

It was my ambition that pushed me to leave. Hannah and I have a deal that we’re going to wait five years before re-evaluating where we live. I wasn’t really living that deal; I was living in purgatory between the idyllic life I had in Nelson, the real life I have here and the imagined life that I could have elsewhere if I moved somewhere that better supported my career. In the first few months of 2025, something in me pushed me to decide to pick one of those three lives. I chose Edmonton. I chose Alberta. I chose Canada. For all their flaws.

I cannot overstate how valuable it is to marry the place in which you live. It is freeing in the same way that my marriage with Hannah is. It closes so many doors, but it also also opens so many more when I’m not second-guessing if I’m even on the “right” path.

With my renewed focus on where I live and the building the things in the world that I really care about. I love Canada (like a lot), it’s hard not to love this place with all it’s nooks and crannies.

But it could be better. I want it to be better.

It bothers me that a many of our most talented people leave because they don’t have the opportunity to pursue their dreams here. It bothers me that we have decided as a country to stop building housing when young people and new families desperately need good places to live. It bothers me that Canadian companies decide to sell abroad because Canadians are not willing to take a chance on something new and buy from a new company. It bothers me that our governments have stopped caring about the services that they provide and whether they’re actually helping people. It bothers me that companies decide to use their government connections to

The nice thing about living in Canada is that I can choose to solve this. If I’m going to be working on problems, I might as well be working on big ones that matter.

That’s why I’m working with Build Canada to solve these problems. We are going to make Canada the most prosperous country on earth.

But before that journey, I worked with Hannah to make the best pottery studio in Edmonton.

The studio is done

One of my true joys in life is seeing Hannah make pottery; there’s a glow that permeates the rest of her soul when she’s actively making. Since we moved back from Nelson, she hasn’t had the physical space to do that. We’ve been working on making our garage a space that is inspiring and worthy of her art. Over the past year, there’s been a lot of progress towards making a space that worked for her art. We built a table; we set up a market booth; we bought, repaired and installed a kiln.

But the space felt drab. It was the epitome of a typical garage: peeling paint; spores of mould; cold, bluish-white paint; disorganized remnants of our recent move; a rusting door that still had it’s sticker proclaiming that it must be painted to be actually waterproof.

Hannah’s studio is deserving of the love and attention that a nursery would get for a parents’ first newborn. The space should be a space that draws out her soul so she can embed it into the her work; especially when the process is gruelling, when every pot is flopping, when the glaze drips and ruins a piece she has spent hours on, when the kiln overfires on the top and underfires the bottom. That is when the space must be most forgiving. It must whisper: just keep going.

This has been the most rewarding project I have ever worked on (despite how many setbacks we’ve had doing it). There is no feeling like seeing Hannah beaming from ear-to-ear over her freshly painted watermelon door. The studio finally feels done and is ready for business.

You can check out her old work at hannahsamek.com (more to come!)

The little things

Canada is so blessed. From beautiful sunsets to glassy waters for paddling to stunning mountains to rainbows. I’m so glad I get to experience it all.

Cats

I am pretty sure there is a cat-tax that I have to pay for being late on this update (this is for you Danielle). Please enjoy Stella caught in the act, Luna contemplating climbing a tree and Stella’s big eyes and bigger ear-tufts.

Video of the Month

The weather in Edmonton is incredible. One minute it’s thundering, the next there’s not a cloud in the sky. The best is the transition between them. Please enjoy this beautiful sun shower.

What I’ve been reading

Rules for Radicals - Saul Alinsky

With Build Canada, I want to make Canada the most prosperous country on earth. How do you even start to tackle that problem? Saul Alinsky spent his life trying to change the world one bit at a time and he explores some of his tactics behind his success in changing the system.

Why are young people attracted to communism? It’s the only major ideology who openly wrote and published about revolution and defined it in terms of fighting for communism instead of fighting against the underlying injustices of our world. The book argues for fighting for the underlying values of our society: fairness, liberal democracy, and and equity; and gives strategy on organizing how to get there.

Value Capture - C. Thi Nguyen

Value Capture explores how we submit (often unwittingly) to the values of institutions who offer us a simple metric that approximates our true values. Large institutions like things that they can track (FitBit tracking steps) to the detriment of what they can’t (the meditative peace when the paddling a kayak on a glassy day) and it’s often easy to defer to the score that they present (the number of steps vs the joy of exercise and the pursuit of better health) rather than what we truly value.

I’m guilty of this in many aspects of my life and I’m looking forward to re-evaluating the ways in which I measure what I value.

Ask

Every month, I am going to have one ask.

I want to be connected to all of you through the joys in your lives. Can you send me a picture of something that made you happy in the past month?