Jason Fried writes in his post “Knives and battleships”:
Specific tools and familiar ingredients combined in different ratios, different molds, for different purposes. Like a baker working from the same tight set of pantry ingredients to make a hundred distinct recipes. You...
Conrad Irwin has an article on the Zed blog “Why LLMs Can't Really Build Software”. He says it boils down to:
the distinguishing factor of effective engineers is their ability to build and maintain clear mental models
We do this by:
Building a mental model of what you wan...
Jan Miksovsky lays out his idea for website creation as content transformation. He starts by talking about tools that hide what’s happening “under the hood”:
A framework’s marketing usually pretends it is unnecessary for you to understand how its core transformation works —...
I’ve been reading listening to Poor Charlie’s Almanack which is a compilation of talks by Charlie Munger, legendary vice-chairman at Berkshire Hathaway.
One thing Charlie talks about is what he calls “sit on your ass investing” which is the opposite of day trading. Rather th...
I was listening to a podcast interview with the Jackson Browne (American singer/songwriter, political activist, and inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame) and the interviewer asks him how he approaches writing songs with social commentaries and critiques — something a...
I’ve written previously about reloading a document using only HTML but that got me thinking: What are all the values you can put in an anchor tag’s href attribute?
Well, I looked around. I found some things I already knew about, e.g.
Link protocols like mailto:, tel:, sms: ...
Some lessons I’ve learned from experience.
1. Install Stuff Indiscriminately From npm
Become totally dependent on others, that’s why they call them “dependencies” after all! Lean in to it.
Once your dependencies break — and they will, time breaks all things — then you can sp...
Here’s Jony Ive in his Stripe interview:
What we make stands testament to who we are. What we make describes our values. It describes our preoccupations. It describes beautiful succinctly our preoccupation.
I’d never really noticed the connection between these two words: occupation and preoccupation.
What comes before occupation? Pre-occupation.
What comes before what you do for a living? What you think about. What you’re preoccupied with.
What you think about will drive you towards what you work on.
So when you’re asking yourself, “What comes next? What should I work on?”
Another way of asking that question is, “What occupies my thinking right now?”
And if what you’re occupied with doesn’t align with what you’re preoccupied with, perhaps it's time for a change.
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Here’s Jony Ive talking to Patrick Collison about measurement and numbers:
People generally want to talk about product attributes that you can measure easily with a number…schedule, costs, speed, weight, anything where you can generally agree that six is a bigger number tha...
Exploring diagram.website, I came across The Computer is a Feeling by Tim Hwang and Omar Rizwan:
the modern internet exerts a tyranny over our imagination. The internet and its commercial power has sculpted the computer-device. It's become the terrain of flat, uniform, com...
After publishing my Analysis of Links From The White House’s “Wire” Website, Tina Nguyen, political correspondent at The Verge, reached out with some questions.
Her questions made me realize that the numbers in my analysis weren’t quite correct (I wasn’t de-depulicating link...
There’s a video on YouTube from “Technology Connections” — who I’ve never heard of or watched until now — called Algorithms are breaking how we think. I learned of this video from Gedeon Maheux of The Iconfactory fame. Speaking in the context of why they made Tapestry, he sa...
After shipping my work transforming HTML with Netlify’s edge functions I realized I have a little bug: the order of the icons specified in the URL doesn’t match the order in which they are displayed on screen.
Why’s this happening?
I have a bunch of links in my HTML document...
A little while back I heard about the White House launching their version of a Drudge Report style website called White House Wire. According to Axios, a White House official said the site’s purpose was to serve as “a place for supporters of the president’s agenda to get the...
I’ve long wanted the ability to create custom collections of icons from my icon gallery.
Today I can browse collections of icons that share pre-defined metadata (e.g. “Show me all icons tagged as blue”) but I can’t create your own arbitrary collections of icons.
That is, unt...
Here’s a screenshot of my inbox from when I was on the last leg of my flight home from family summer vacation:
That’s pretty representative of the flurry of emails I get when I fly, e.g.:
Check in now
Track your bags
Your flight will soon depart
Your flight will soon boa...
I recently got my copy of the Internet Phone Book. Look who’s hiding on the bottom inside spread of page 32:
The book is divided into a number of categories — such as “Small”, “Text”, and “Ecology” — and I am beyond flattered to be listed under the category “HTML”! You ca...
This post is a secret to everyone! Read more about RSS Club.
I’ve been reading Apple in China by Patrick McGee.
There’s this part in there where he’s talking about a guy who worked for Apple and was known for being ruthless, stopping at nothing to negotiate the...
Dan Abramov in “Static as a Server”:
Static is a server that runs ahead of time.
“Static” and “dynamic” don’t have to be binaries that describe an entire application architecture. As Dan describes in his post, “static” or “dynamic” it’s all just computers doing stuff.
Comp...
Dan Abramov on his blog (emphasis mine):
The division between the frontend and the backend is physical. We can’t escape from the fact that we’re writing client/server applications. Some logic is naturally more suited to either side. But one side should not dominate the othe...
Radek Sienkiewicz in a funny-because-its-true piece titled “Why do AI company logos look like buttholes?“:
We made a circular shape [logo] with some angles because it looked nice, then wrote flowery language to justify why our…design is actually profound.
As someone who ha...
I quite enjoyed this talk. Some of the technical details went over my head (I don’t know what “split 16-bit mask into two 8-bit LTUs” means) but I could still follow the underlying point.
First off, Andreas has a great story at the beginning about how he has a friend with a ...
OH: It’s just JavaScript, right? I know JavaScript.
My coworker who will inevitably spend the rest of the day debugging an electron issue
— @jonkuperman.com on BlueSky
“It’s Just JavaScript!” is probably a phrase you’ve heard before. I’ve used it myself a number of times....
I came across this post from the tech collective crftd. about how software is in a process of “continuous disintegration”:
One of the uncomfortable truths we sometimes have to break to people is that software isn't just never “done”. Worse even, it rots…
The practices of co...
A clip from “Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy” features a former executive of an online retailer explaining how motivated they were to make buying easy. Like, incredibly easy. So easy, in fact, that their goal was to “reduce your time to think a little bit more critically ab...
I’ve written about how I don’t love the idea of overriding basic computing controls. Instead, I generally favor opting to respect user choice and provide the controls their platform does.
Of course, this means platforms need to surface better primitives rather than supplying...
In his post about “Vibe Drive Development”, Robin Rendle warns against what I’ll call the pseudoscientific approach to product building prevalent across the software industry:
when folks at tech companies talk about data they’re not talking about a well-researched study fro...
I’ve spent so much time, had so many headaches, and encountered so much complexity from what, in my estimation, boils down to this: trying to get something to work on multiple computers.
It might be time to just go back to having one computer — a personal laptop — do everyth...
I loved this talk from Alexander Petros titled “Building the Hundred-Year Web Service”. What follows is summation of my note-taking from watching the talk on YouTube.
Is what you’re building for future generations:
Useful for them?
Maintainable by them?
Adaptable by them?
...
Following up on a previous article I wrote about backwards compatibility, I came across this document from Rick Byers of the Chrome team titled “Blink principles of web compatibility” which outlines how they navigate introducing breaking changes.
“Hold up,” you might say. “B...
