Jason Gorman writes about the word “continuous” and its place in making software. We think of making software in stages (and we often assign roles to ourselves and other people based on these stages):
the design phase, the coding phase, the testing phase, the integration ph...
Steve Krouse wrote a piece that has me nodding along:
Programming, like writing, is an activity, where one iteratively sharpens what they're doing as they do it. (You wouldn't believe how many drafts I've written of this essay.)
There’s an incredible amount of learning and...
I shipped some updates to my notes site. Nothing huge. Just small stuff.
But what is big stuff except a bunch of small stuff combined? So small stuff is important too.
What follows is a bunch of tiny details you probably don’t care about, but they were all decisions I had to...
Dave Rupert puts words to the feeling in the air: the unspoken promise of AI is that you can automate away all the tasks and people who stand in your way.
Sometimes I feel like there’s a palpable tension in the air as if we’re waiting to see whether AI will replace designer...
Imagine I’m the design leader at your org and I present the following guidelines I want us to adopt as a team for doing design work:
Typography: Use expressive, purposeful fonts and avoid default stacks (Inter, Roboto, Arial, system).
Motion: Use a few meaningful animations...
Greg Knauss has my attention with a food analogy in his article “Lose Myself”:
A Ding Dong from a factory is not the same thing as a gâteau au chocolat et crème chantilly from a baker which is not the same thing as cramming chunks of chocolate and scoops of whipped cream di...
I like pie.
And I’ve learned that if I want a pie done right, I gotta do it myself.
Somewhere along my pilgrimage to pie perfection, I began taking a photo of each bake — pic or it didn’t happen.
Despite all my rhetoric for “owning your own content”, I’ve hypocritically used...
The other day I was looking at the team billing section of an AI product. They had a widget labeled “Usage leaderboard”.
For whatever reason, that phrase at that moment made me pause and reflect — and led me here to this post.
It’s an interesting label. You could argue the w...
For my future self, these are a few of my notes from this book.
A take from one historian on the Luddite movement:
If workmen disliked certain machines, it was because of the use that they were being put, not because they were machines or because they were new
Can’t help ...
Dave Rupert articulated something in “Priority of idle hands” that’s been growing in my subconscious for years:
I had a small, intrusive realization the other day that computers and the internet are probably bad for me […] This is hard to accept because a lot of my work, ho...
Over the years, I’ve used different icon sets on my blog. Right now I use Heroicons.
The recommended way to use them is to copy/paste the source from the website directly into your HTML. It’s a pretty straightforward process:
Go to the website
Search for the icon you want
H...
SITUATION: there are 14 competing AI labs.
“We can’t trust any of these people with super-intelligence. We need to build it ourselves to ensure it’s done right!"
“YEAH!”
SOON: there are 15 competing AI labs.
(See: xkcd on standards.)
The irony: “we’re the responsible ones” is each lab’s founding mythology as they spin out of each other.
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Bluesky
In this new AI world, “taste” is the thing everyone claims is the new supreme skill.
But I think “care” is the one I want to see in the products I buy.
Can you measure care?
Does scale drive out care?
If a product conversation is reduced to being arbitrated exclusively by n...
This is one of those small things that drives me nuts.
Why? I don’t know. I think it has something to do with the fact that I have a computer that is faster than any computer I’ve ever used in my entire life — and yet, clicking on buttons results in slight but perceptible de...
I recently updated my collection of macOS icons to include Apple’s new “Creator Studio” family of icons.
Doing this — in tandem with seeing funny things like this post on Mastodon — got me thinking about the history of these icons.
I built a feature on my icon gallery sit...
Researchers at Anthropic published their findings around how AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills:
We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery […] Using AI sped up the task slightly, but this didn’t reach the thre...
You’ve probably heard this famous quote from Steve Jobs about saying ‘no’:
People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick caref...
So I’m making a thing and I want it to be styled different if the link’s been visited.
Rather than build something myself in JavaScript, I figure I’ll just hook into the browser’s mechanism for tracking if a link’s been visited (a sensible approach, if I do say so myself).
...
Nic Chan comes out as the whistleblower on how many “Contact Us” pages are made (spoiler: they’re designed to keep us from contacting anyone).
A “fuck off contact page” is what a company throws together when they actually don’t want anyone to contact them at all. They […] a...
“The data doesn’t lie.”
I imagine that’s what the cigarette companies said.
“The data doesn’t lie. People want this stuff. They’re buying it in droves. We’re merely giving them what they want.”
Which sounds more like an attempt at exoneration than a reason to exist.
Demand...
The other day I was browsing YouTube — as one does — and I clicked a link in the video description to a book.
I was then subjected to a man-in-the-middle attack, where YouTube put themselves in the middle of me and the link I had clicked:
Hyperlinks are subversive. Big Te...
I redesigned my www website. Why?
The end of year / holiday break is a great time to work on such things.
I wanted to scratch an itch.
Websites are a worry stone [gestures at current state of the world]
Do I really need a reason? Nope.
I read something along the lines of “...
In his talk, I like the way Jake Nations pits easy vs. simple:
Easy means you can add it to your system quickly. Simple means you can understand the work that you’ve done.
I like this framing.
Easy means you can do with little effort.
Simple means you can understand what you do with little effort.
In other words: easy measures the effort in doing, while simple measures the effort in understanding the doing.
For example: npm create framework@latest or “Hey AI, build an instagram clone”. These both get you a website with little effort (easy) but do you understand what you just did (simple)?
It’s easy to get complexity, but it’s not easy to get simplicity.
(I get this is arguing semantics and definitions, but I find it to be a useful framing personally. Thanks Jake!)
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Bluesky
I’ve been slowly reading my copy of “The Internet Phone Book” and I recently read an essay in it by Elan Ullendorff called “The New Turing Test”.
Elan argues that what matters in a work isn’t the tools used to make it, but the “expressiveness” of the work itself (was it made...
Matthias Ott shared a link to a post from Anthropic titled “Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign”, which I read because I’m interested in the messy intersection of AI and security.
I gotta say: I don’t know if I’ve ever read anything quite l...
I don’t much enjoy being a lab rat to your half-baked ideas.
I can tell when your approach to what I use is: “Ship it and let’s see how people respond.”
Well let me tell you something: I’m not going to respond.
My desire to give you constructive feedback is in direct correl...
The setup for my notes blog looks like this:
Content is plain-text markdown files (synced via Dropbox, editable in iA Writer on my Mac, iPad, or iPhone)
Codebase is on GitHub
Builds are triggered in Netlify by a Shortcut
I try to catch spelling issues and what not before I...
In “The Future of Software Development is Software Developers” Jason Gorman alludes to how terrible natural language is at programming computers:
The hard part of computer programming isn’t expressing what we want the machine to do in code. The hard part is turning human th...
I recommended against using an AI browser unless you wanted to participate in a global experiment in security. My recommendation did come with a caveat:
But probably don’t listen to me. I’m not a security expert
Well, now the experts (that you pay for) have weighed in.
Ga...
If you subscribe to this blog, you must like it — right? I mean, you are subscribed to it.
And if you like this blog, you might also like my notes blog.
It’s where I take short notes of what I read, watch, listen to, or otherwise consume, add my two cents, and fire it off in...
