Poor bottlenecks. Always seen as problematic, antithetical to efficiency.
But bottlenecks aren’t universally bad.
Think about it: a bottle’s neck is designed to constrain the amount of liquid that can flow out. A decrease in bandwidth is its entire purpose! Otherwise an over...
I’ve got Netlify Analytics turned on for a few of my websites.
I use it send myself a little daily digest that alerts me when folks link to my writing, be it an individual sending me a few referrals, a newsletter sending me a few hundred, or Hacker News sending me thousands....
A URL is a technical thing: a hostname, a path, a port, an origin, some query parameters, etc.
But a link is a cultural thing: an invitation, a citation, a gift, a shortcut, a connection.
All from a simple idea: here’s a thing that points to another thing, off you go!
We’ve ...
Speaking of being on the internet and finding things that make you go, “Hey! It’s not just me!” I scrolled across this skeet from Tyler Gaw:
I just dug to the bottom of my Big Box of Cables to find two cables that I needed for something. They've been in the bottom for 10+ y...
Marcin Wichary has a lovely article titled “Photoshop’s challenges with focus, pt. 2”. If you’re into the minutiae of interface design, this is a good ‘un. It perfectly illustrates how impossible it is to try and compare two interfaces side by side as static images.
What mat...
I was reading Jason Gorman’s article “The Wall Confronting Reliable Coding Agent Autonomy” and he says:
the journey from 90% to 99% reliability is just as hard as it was to get to 90%. And from 99% to 99.9% is just as hard again.
This stood out, as I’ve been experiencing m...
Speaking of things we know individually, but let slide collectively, here’s Jeremy Keith talking about how we all used Flash:
Remember when almost every website had a Flash intro? Everyone knew they were annoying and uneccessary, but everyone else was doing it.
And here’s ...
Eric Bailey has a fun little post about how we need more than a few icons to express the nuance of our shared human experience.
For example, he suggests Netflix provide some feedback buttons to indicate the kinds of experiences we all share consuming and rating media:
“Just...
807 blog posts across 14 years.
That’s how much I’ve published on my blog at the time of this writing.
And here’s the question I’ve been turning over in my mind: “How do I convey that kind of volume across time in a more interesting way than a mere reverse-chronological list...
Dave Rupert wrote about shipping microlighter: a tool for handling syntax highlighting using the CSS Custom Highlights API. I saw his post the day he released it, and I had an implementation PR up for my blog by end of day.
Then, like I do with so many things, I let it sit t...
On my icon gallery sites, I have metadata I’ve manually added over the years to tag certain icons as being predominantly “blue” or “orange” or some other color.
Then I use this metadata to present icons of (roughly) the same color. It’s kinda neat to be able to browse a wall...
In his talk “Why AI Is Breaking Software Security As We Know It” (my notes here), Feross Aboukhadijeh talks about the Axios npm incident and how the maintainer got phished by succumbing to (amongst other things) a faux Microsoft Teams interface:
this is the kind of thing th...
Gordon Brander writes:
The thing about computers is that they can do anything you wish, so long as you specify your wish in exacting detail. However, LLMs relieve this constraint. An LLM can extrapolate what you mean (more or less) from just a few words. So computers can do...
My whole life I’ve felt like I have great eyesight (and I still do).
But lately I’ve been noticing what feels like…some slippage.
Nothing big. Just this feeling in the morning like, as my brain and body wake up, my vision needs to as well.
The strange novelty of this phenome...
Terry Godier has a post titled “Mea culpa” (which, given his framing, might’ve been better titled “Claude’s Culpa”). I’m not sure how much to even trust anything in his post given the backstory, but this line stood out:
I was careless in relying on AI [...] without doing th...
Every zeitgeist comes with new design idioms unique to its challenges. Many of them disappear as fads change, but others bake themselves into deeper parts of existing software interaction paradigms.
For example, there’s the hamburger menu (≡) which saw a proliferation during...
Jason Grigsby has a great article where he surfaces an opinion from the Safari team about how AI agents shouldn’t get special treatment:
An agent acting on a user’s behalf is, in effect, assistive technology: it should operate a site as the user would, and the site should n...
Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar and former president of Disney Animation, was on the David Senra podcast and I quite enjoyed the interview.
(If you like the interview, you should read his book.)
Ed talks about what he considered his job to be: get the dynamics right for gro...
There are two wolves inside of me, lol.
Some days I want to be a “designer”. Other days I want to be a “developer”.
On the days I find myself wanting to feed the developer, it’s often because making something “work” seems easier (and more impressive) than making something “g...
I wish I could remember how this podcast came across my radar so I could give credit where it’s due. But alas, I cannot.
It’s episode 217 with Dr. Iain McGilchrist.
At one point, he shares his perspective about how science and reason can only take you so far:
[science and r...
As icons continue to change across Apple’s platforms, I have thoughts. They mainly revolve around two perspectives:
What I think of icons as a long-time user of Apple’s platforms.
What I think of icons as a digital collector and physical archivist of icons.
Let’s see if I ...
In the past, search engines and the open web granted access to other people’s knowledge but the task fell to you to synthesize an understanding from it and build a capability to act.
Now with LLMs, it’s possible to build things you don’t fully understand which then require a...
“We asked 100 people: What are the top three companies on earth best positioned to make a world-class Mac-assed Mac app?”
Buzz!
“Apple!”
Survey says:
Yes! Apple at the number one spot.
Makes sense. Who better to make the very definition of a great Mac app than the people ...
I made some updates to my notes blog, including a change to how my “Shuffle” feature worked.
Figured I’d blog about it.
Shuffle? On a Blog?
At the time of this writing, I have 974 “notes” that I’ve published.
For fun, I have a “shuffle” button that digs up a random note fro...
I was popping off about negation being an act of creativity, when Blake Watson introduce me to the idea of the “This Page Intentionally Left Blank”-Project (Internet Archive):
In former times printed manuals had some blank pages, usually with the remark “this page intentio...
I quite enjoyed this talk from Bryan Cantrill where he discusses the difficult engineering problems they overcame while working on their company Oxide.
Some of the problems they ran into were bugs. But these weren’t any ordinary bugs, they were company-destroying bugs: bugs ...
If you have’t heard, Om Malik passed away.
People are sharing stories of their graceful encounters with him.
This one is mine.
Back at the beginning of 2021, I set a goal to write 72 blog posts.
I was puttering along, publishing whatever came to mind, mostly figuring that n...
John Gruber writes about those annoying popups every website seems to have now and while he does a great job tearing into these ubiquitous, user-hostile patterns, one of the things that stood out to me about his piece was this meta commentary on blogging. Here’s John:
If yo...
Consistency serves a purpose in visual design, but it seems to have become the purpose of a lot of visual design.
Look no further than these evolutions of macOS icons (image courtesy of BasicAppleGuy):
The Creator Studio icons are undeniably consistent visually: rounded r...
You’ve probably heard the term.
It’s meant to convey how difficult it can be to start something.
“Blank page paralysis”.
But for my money, beginning is easy. Finishing is the hard part.
In software, they call it “the last 90%”.
In logistics, they call it “the last mile”.
It’s that final stretch that’s disproportionately hard.
Finishing makes something real and finite, subject to judgment.
As I near completion, there’s a little voice in my head that says, “As long as it’s unfinished, there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s still potentially perfect!”
I don’t struggle with blank page paralysis.
But I am paralyzed in the face of a full page ready for publishing.
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