Writing
Notes on building products, working with data, and growing through the work.
More notes on projects, life, and faith are available at Curated Notes(opens in a new tab).
16 notes
- PersonalAugust 20267 min read
Working Full-Time While Taking Data Mining: What This Summer Required
This summer, I worked full-time as a Data Analyst at Kewaunee Scientific while completing an accelerated Data Mining course. Keeping my professional work at a high level while meeting every deadline and maintaining an A required more structure and discipline than any summer before it.
Read note - Data & AIAugust 20268 min read
AI Literacy: The Skill People Cannot Afford to Ignore
AI literacy is becoming a basic professional skill. The people learning how these systems work, where they fail, and how to build reliable workflows around them are creating an advantage that will become increasingly difficult to recover later.
Read note - ProjectsAugust 20268 min read
Building Cade: The Agentic Operating System That Remembers My Work
I built Cade to solve the continuity problem that makes most AI feel temporary. He connects Claude Code to a structured Obsidian memory system that preserves my projects, priorities, decisions, workflows, and useful corrections across sessions.
Read note - PersonalJuly 20268 min read
If One Thing Matters, It Is Confidence
Confidence does not replace skill, preparation, or humility. It determines whether you trust yourself enough to use them, recover when something goes wrong, and continue becoming the person you believe you can be.
Read note - BusinessJune 20266 min read
One Connection Can Change the Direction of Your Career
Professional relationships are not a side effect of good work. One genuine connection can lead to an opportunity, introduction, lesson, or recommendation that changes the direction of an entire career.
Read note - BusinessJune 20267 min read
Your Digital Presence Speaks Before You Ever Do
After roughly 100 applications produced only two interviews in 2025, I rebuilt how I presented my experience. In 2026, around 150 applications led to more than 20 interview opportunities and four final-round processes.
Read note - ProjectsJune 20267 min read
Building davishiggins.com: An Experimental Home for Everything I Do
I built davishiggins.com as more than a portfolio. It is an experimental, animated digital hub for my work, experience, professional direction, and contact information, created through more iterations than I can reasonably count.
Read note - ProjectsMay 20267 min read
Building Contender: Architecture, Failures, and What It Took
The honest behind-the-scenes of building a full-stack NBA analytics platform in college, including the data issues, projection logic, deployment problems, and product decisions that made it harder and more useful than expected.
Read note - ProjectsApril 20265 min read
CrownCode AI: Shipping a Claude-Powered Website Generator
What I learned shipping an AI-powered website generator in a week, from prompt structure and output control to the architecture decisions that mattered more than the initial build speed.
Read note - PersonalApril 20266 min read
Balancing Everything: Work, School, the Gym, and Growing on All Fronts
I do not balance everything perfectly. I use structure, routines, faith, and honest priorities to keep moving through school, work, the gym, building projects, and growing as a person.
Read note - Data & AIMarch 20266 min read
What 20 Executive Dashboards Taught Me About Real Data
My internship changed how I think about data. Not because dashboards are flashy, but because they showed me how messy definitions, unclear questions, and weak data quality affect real business decisions.
Read note - BusinessMarch 20264 min read
Personal Branding as a Service: What the Work Taught Me About Clarity
Helping someone package their work for career opportunities taught me that personal branding is mostly clarity. The real value comes from organizing experience, proof, and positioning so the right people understand it faster.
Read note - Data & AIFebruary 20266 min read
Building My Claude Code Course: Structure, Learning, and What I Would Have Wanted
I built my Claude Code course around the guide I wish I had at the beginning: setup, task files, project memory, agents, review loops, debugging, and the habits that keep AI-assisted coding under control.
Read note - Data & AIFebruary 20265 min read
How I Use AI Every Day: Systems Over Shortcuts
I use AI every day, but not to avoid the work. I use it to plan cleaner, write sharper instructions, debug faster, and ship projects with more structure and control.
Read note - BusinessFebruary 20266 min read
Building Higgins Digital: Platforms, Marketing, and Learning the Hard Parts
Starting Higgins Digital taught me that building the website was only the beginning. The harder part was learning the platforms, creating trust, explaining the value, and marketing the work without sounding like every other agency.
Read note - PersonalJanuary 20264 min read
Building in Public at 20: The Real Version
I am 20 years old and building real projects in public while still figuring things out. This is what nobody tells you about balancing confidence, mistakes, polish, and progress at the same time.
Read note