Golf content on social media is my online junk food and the other day I came across a video interviewing professional golfers that asks: “What does an amateur golfer have to shoot to be considered good?”
It’s a leading question because the phrasing implicitly frames a number...
Code isn’t just a way to implement a design, it’s a way to find one.
With an interface, you have to use it, feel it, interact with it, and poke at it to see the relationships between things.
Change X, see Y react.
If it doesn’t feel right, tweak it.
Change X again, now Y reacts differently.
Better.
Keep tweaking — this here, that there, until the relationships of all the disparate elements fall into place as a single whole.
Balanced.
Design is “how it works” and code is the tool to specify how it works.
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Bluesky
The very first computer programming class I ever took introduced me to the idea of there being different kinds of numbers, like integers, floats, and doubles (it was a C++ course).
“You mean, when I assign a variable, I have to say up front what kind of number this is?”
It w...
I’ve been slowly listening to Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger.
I like his practicality. He’s never trying to be overly academic, as if he needs to prove how smart he is.
He says Berkshire’s success doesn’t come from them solving har...
This is an iconic observation:
If you put the Apple icons in reverse it looks like the portfolio of someone getting really really good at icon design
This isn’t, however, just the story of Apple’s Creator Studio icons. It’s the unfolding story of icon design across the e...
Here’s Scott Jenson in his insightful piece “The Ma of a New Machine”:
the chatbot interface [makes us] feel like deep cognitive work is happening. But the interface is fundamentally reactive. It spits complex text at you, you skim it quickly, and you immediately type a rea...
I’ve been posting about how you can make lots of HTML pages and leverage navigations over in-page, JS-dependent interactions.
Now I’m gonna post another example.
On my icon sites, I have a little widget that allows you to resize the icons you’re looking at.
Previously, I ...
I wrote about building websites with LLMs — (L)ots of (L)ittle ht(M)l page(s) — and I think it’s time for a post-mortem on that approach:
I like it.
I’ve tweaked a few things from that original post but the underlying idea is still the same, which I would describe as:
Avoid ...
I’ve been thinking about speed which is why Chris Coyier caught my attention in his latest piece discussing how AI might be 10✕ing the speed with which we code, but it’s not making our software 10✕ better:
Faster individuals don’t make a fast company
My mind immediately we...
I’ve been thinking about speed which is why Chris Coyier caught my attention in his latest piece discussing how AI might be 10✕ing the speed with which we code, but it’s not making our software 10✕ better:
Faster individuals don’t make a fast company
My mind immediately we...
In the early 2000’s, my parents took us on a road trip to Glacier National Park in Montana.
We made the journey in our new (used) family van: a green Dodge Caravan whose reputation was soon to become “a lemon”.
I was a teenager and didn’t pay a lot of attention to the detail...
Speed has become the primary virtue of the modern world. Everything is sacrificed to it.
Move fast (and break things, not as a goal but as a consequence).
Wisdom requires allowing yourself to be undone by experience:
An opinion dismantled by reality.
An artifact torn apart ...
I quipped on BlueSky:
It’s interesting how AI proponents are often like "skill issue" when the LLM doesn't work like someone expects.
Whereas when human-centered UX people see someone using it wrong, they're like "skill issue on us, the people who made this"
This is top of...
Me, in 2025, on Mastodon:
I love tools like Netlify and deploying my small personal sites with git push
But i'm not gonna lie, 2025 might be the year I go back to just doing builds locally and pushing the deploys from my computer.
I'm sick of devops'ing stupid stuff because...
Did you know that Jesus gave advice about prototyping with an LLM? Here’s Luke 14:28-30:
Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it? For if you lay the foundation and are not able ...
Simon Willison wrote about how he vibe coded his dream presentation app for macOS.
I also took a stab at vibe coding my dream app: an RSS reader.
To clarify: Reeder is my dream RSS app and it already exists, so I guess you could say my dreams have already come true?
But I’ve...
Marcin Wichary brings attention to this lovely dialog in ClarisWorks from 1997:
He quips:
this breaks the rule of button copy being fully comprehensible without having to read the surrounding strings first, perhaps most well-known as the “avoid «click here»” rule. Never ...
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...
