The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Engineering management / careers

Kent Nguyen's Lab

kentnguyen.com

Personal research lab and engineering notebook of Kent Nguyen — Serial Tech Entrepreneur, Systems Architect, and Inventor.

Engineering management / careersEssays / personalAI / ML

’15’20’25
Posts
41 from 24 Aug 2014 to 31 Aug 2026
Posting
monthly (19 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog

2026 16

  1. Latest Publication Your Blog Should Be an AI-Powered Second Brain, Not a Newsletter Why newsletters on Substack and Medium are dead ends in the LLM era. How a sovereign Git repository, pure HTML, and multi-agent AI sparring turn your writing into an active, compounding Second Brain. August 31, 2026
  2. My secret to getting rid of burnout permanently August 24, 2014 Why inability to take breaks is not the real cause of burnout, how to identify what you cannot miss out on, and scheduling regular life-saving checkpoints.
  3. Staying productive and effective while on Slack June 15, 2016 Actionable tips for reclaiming time on Slack: meaningful channel names, keyboard shortcuts, muting non-essentials, push settings, and keyword triggers.
  4. [M.A.C.E] Introduction to framework May 6, 2018 A performance-assessment thought framework evaluating Mindset, Ability, Condition, and Expectation for objective hiring, promotion, and demotion decisions.
  5. My lessons on leadership August 8, 2018 Lessons from a 10-year startup journey: servant leadership, delegation without support as abdication, checking without micromanaging, and showing off team work.
  6. [IOTD][#2] My definition of mediation August 30, 2018 Redefining meditation beyond yoga mats: motorcycle joyrides, subconscious flow, repetitive morning chores, and being alone with your thoughts.
  7. [IOTD][#7] Leaving a legacy September 12, 2018 Flipping the perspective from who we should be to what kind of legacies and stories of character people will remember after we are gone.
  8. [IOTD][#8] Having lunch alone September 13, 2018 Going against networking default to eat alone, stroll down the street, explore small alleyways, pace for self-reflection, and discover new routines.
  9. [M.A.C.E] Management perspective September 17, 2018 Revisiting Conditions and Expectations from management perspective: title hard power, team culture, personal situations, and setting right expectations.
  10. [IOTD][#9] Questioning life September 19, 2018 Everything you do daily is a consequence of choices: commuting hours, 9-to-5 schedules, lunchtime conditioning, and establishing your own baseline.
  11. [IOTD][#10] I’m a world traveller, but it’s not the typical definition you think September 22, 2018 Why world travel is about exploring people, perspectives, and blindspots in daily conversations rather than physical passport stamps.
  12. [IOTD][#11] Today I choose my commute October 4, 2018 My morning commute is horrible, today I made it not so much. Saigon traffic, iPhone SE bridge view, Apple Watch Breathe reminder, and pause and feel.
  13. [IOTD][#12] Technology shaping perspectives October 25, 2018 How long can you keep up with new technology? Early electronics tinkering, shifting childhood baselines, and dedicated iPad mini FaceTime setup.
  14. The Five-Step Framework for Effective Task Delegation for Managers September 16, 2023 How managers ensure an ever-expanding team stays empowered and efficient using a five-step framework: Define, Delegate, Support, Check, and Show/Praise.
  15. How to Find Your Co-founder? Tips for First-Time Founders July 1, 2023 A comprehensive framework for first-time founders to identify who you need, leverage VC networks, assess complementary skillsets, and evaluate personal lifestyle compatibility.
  16. Navigating Employee Dynamics & Decoding Performance with M.A.C.E: A Leadership Tool September 18, 2023 How leaders make objective hiring, promotion, and termination decisions by analyzing Mindset, Ability, Context, and Expectation.

2025 9

  1. Digital Transformation for CXOs: A Practical Leadership Framework January 2, 2025 A pragmatic framework for enterprise leaders modernizing data architecture, engineering culture, and internal systems.
  2. AI is my Co-founder, VC Mentor, Ghostwriter, and Coffee Buddy November 15, 2023 How specialized AI tools and agent workflows enhance engineering execution, research synthesis, and day-to-day productivity.
  3. From Cash to Courage: Startup Leadership Lessons on Meaning, Risk, and Resilience February 14, 2025 Lessons on risk, resilience, and personal alignment after exiting corporate engineering and navigating early-stage startups.
  4. The AI Tipping Point: What Founders and CXOs Should Do Next March 30, 2025 Strategic steps for founders and executive teams navigating AI automation, organizational readiness, and technical workflow shifts.
  5. From Mad Scientist to Serial Tech Entrepreneur: My Founder Journey April 30, 2025 Reflections on transitioning from hands-on laboratory research and software engineering to scaling venture-backed tech startups.
  6. Mental Health for Founders: The Core Operating System of Life and Leadership May 9, 2025 Why psychological resilience and mental health serve as the foundational operating system for startup founders and engineering leaders.
  7. Founder Psychology: Using the Light and Dark Triad Framework May 25, 2025 Applying the Light and Dark Triad psychological framework to founder dynamics, executive due diligence, and partnership integrity.
  8. Digital Forensic with AI 101 - Corporate Espionage by NS and DNS manipulation December 23, 2025 A technical review of digital forensic methods for investigating DNS hijacking, unauthorized nameserver modifications, and infrastructure compromise.
  9. The (Software) Developer Advantage: Why AI is your future, not your Fear December 29, 2025 Why software engineers with systems-level knowledge have a structural advantage when orchestrating and verifying AI code generation.

2023 4

  1. Dev ơi đừng sợ AI! Bạn mới là người nắm giữ tương lai! December 29, 2025 Phân tích lợi thế cấu trúc của lập trình viên trong kỷ nguyên AI và cách tận dụng công cụ tự động hóa để nâng cao năng suất.
  2. AI Automation for Leaders Workshop, Jan 2026 January 20, 2026 Key takeaways from our AI automation workshop for executives, focusing on mindset shifts and high-leverage agent workflows.
  3. Our servers were attacked on Vietnamese New Year 2026 by a Vietnamese Botnet - 18th Feb 2026. February 19, 2026 How a Redis caching incident triggered a holiday outage during Vietnamese New Year 2026, and how automated diagnostics restored server uptime.
  4. The Rise of the One-Person Dev Team March 1, 2026 How individual engineers orchestrate agentic workflows, multi-screen setups, and large context models to deliver full software architectures independently.

2018 10

  1. Technology Is Real Power: The New Rules of Influence March 3, 2026 Why core software, protocol control, and physical infrastructure dictate real-world influence across modern industries.
  2. AI Minions and the New Operating System for Work March 18, 2026 How multi-agent AI execution loops and autonomous subagents are reshaping startup workflows and organizational throughput.
  3. Which AI Level Are You? (Why Most Are Stuck at Level 1 or 2) April 16, 2026 A practical 5-level framework for assessing AI workflow maturity, from basic chat prompts to autonomous multi-agent systems.
  4. The Lean Stack: Why We Went Back to HTML, CSS, and Fundamentals July 4, 2026 How Alpine.js, htmx, Bulma, Bun, and Hono replaced complex frontend pipelines in our work, and why self-hosting forms the core of a resilient local AI stack.
  5. Rust on ESP32 and Single-Board Computers: Our Embedded Stack July 10, 2026 Why Rust replaced C and Python scripts in our embedded systems, providing memory safety on ESP32, single static binaries on SBCs, and reliable agentic generation.
  6. ESP32 + CM4/CM5: Our Hardware Architecture for Self-Hosted AIoT July 14, 2026 The two-tier hardware stack behind our AIoT deployments, combining low-power ESP32 edge nodes with a CM4/CM5 local core to keep telemetry on-site.
  7. Second Brains for Teams: Organisational AI Without the Complexity July 22, 2026 Why every team needs an organizational second brain, and how a maintained knowledge repository linked to local AI beats multi-million dollar enterprise platforms.
  8. AI Coding & The Master Stylesheet: Building Your Living Design Language July 27, 2026 Why AI models suffer from UI drift, how living stylesheet pages anchor LLMs, and how hand-tweaking CSS tokens maintains consistent design quality.
  9. The Rise of Legal Engineers: How Systems Thinking and Frontier AI Disrupted Big Law August 24, 2026 Why the future of complex legal disputes belongs to legal engineers—technologists who build automated multi-model AI pipelines to master process law, collapse the billable-hour pyramid, and partner wi
  10. Why the Best AI Tech Stack Is from 1995 (HTML, CSS, JS, SQL) August 25, 2026 Why 30-year-old primitives—HTML, CSS, JS, and SQL—run circles around modern frameworks when building with AI agents, from Windows 3.11 FoxPro to Alpine and SQLite.

2016 1

  1. Vipassana 101: How an Accidental 12-Day Silent Retreat Rewired My Tech Mind August 27, 2026 How an accidental signup during a WordPress crash led to 12 days of noble silence in July 2020, and what enduring stillness taught a Data/BI startup founder about pain, impermanence, and ego.

2014 1

  1. Vipassana 102: Sleepless Solitude, the Endless Thought Stream, and Lessons That Took Years to Land August 28, 2026 Sitting 10 hours daily with an active mind: breath focus, the hot water bucket night routine, sleepless nights in Room 28, and why the quiet lessons of Vipassana took years to surface.