Articles & Interviews
Blog
Articles, interviews, and thoughts on self-directed learning.
Learning
The bookshelf and the classroom
Announcing a partnership with Open Lesson, the Socratic AI tutor that never gives you the answer. Here is why I deliberately did not build an AI tutor inside Dantes, what Daniel Colomer built instead, and what fifty years of learning-science research actually says about why letting yourself get stuck is the point.
Resource Guide
How to Actually Learn a Language (From Someone Who Took the Long Way Round)
Four languages, three decades, and an honest account of what actually moved the needle — what the research says, which tools earn their keep, how AI is reshaping tutoring, and the one habit that beats every method.
27 min readResource Guide
Landscape Photography: A Complete Guide to Getting Serious in 2026
Fifteen years of shooting landscapes — from Norway's northern lights on a borrowed Canon to the Isles of Skye with a Sony A7 IV — mapped into a complete resource guide for every level. Gear, composition, planning tools, editing, astrophotography, printing, and the philosophy that separates good photographers from great ones.
26 min readMusic & Audio
Learning Piano as an Adult: A Musician's Honest Guide to the Best Resources in 2026
A saxophone player who picked up piano in his late twenties maps every resource worth your time — method books, apps, YouTube channels, free courses, and sheet music libraries — with the honesty of someone who has hit every wall an adult learner can hit.
19 min readResource Guide
Learning Structured Finance for Free: A Comprehensive Resource Guide
The entire knowledge base of a trillion-dollar industry is available online at zero cost — if you know where to look. A practitioner's map of every credible free resource across project finance, LBOs, securitization, asset finance, and trade finance.
18 min readAnnouncement
Introducing the Dantes.io Blog
We're launching a blog dedicated to helping you learn better. Expect learning roadmaps, resource deep-dives, expert interviews, and research-backed strategies — all designed to make self-directed learning less overwhelming.
4 min readNewsletter
Stay in the
reading room.
New articles and interviews, delivered when they're worth your time.