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The Mac App Flea Market

Have you ever searched for “AI chat” in the Mac App Store? I have. It’s like strolling through one of those counterfeit, replica markets where all the goods look legit at first glance. But then when you look closer, you realize something is off. For the query “AI chat”, ther...

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Some Love For Python

I really enjoyed watching Python: The Documentary (from CultRepo, formerly Honeypot, same makers as the TypeScript documentary). Personally, I don’t write much Python and am not involved in the broader Python community. That said, I love how this documentary covers a lot of ...

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Trying to Make Sense of Casing Conventions on the Web

(I present to you my stream of consciousness on the topic of casing as it applies to the web platform.) I’m reading about the new command and commandfor attributes — which I’m super excited about, declarative behavior invocation in HTML? YES PLEASE!! — and one thing that str...

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Successive Prototypes Bridge the Gap Between Idea and Reality

Dismissing an idea because it doesn’t work in your head is doing a disservice to the idea. (Same for dismissing someone else’s idea because it doesn’t work in your head.) The only way to truly know if an idea works is to test it. The gap between an idea and reality is the w...

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Consistent Navigation Across My Inconsistent Websites, Part II

I refreshed the little thing that let’s you navigate consistently between my inconsistent subdomains (video recording). Here’s the tl;dr on the update: I had to remove some features on each site to make this feel right. Takeaway: adding stuff is easy, removing stuff is h...

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Bottomless Subtleties

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...

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Just a Little More Context Bro, I Promise, and It’ll Fix Everything

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...

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Choosing Tools To Make Websites

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 —...

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Sit On Your Ass Web Development

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...

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Writing: Blog Posts and Songs

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...

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A Few Things About the Anchor Element’s href You Might Not Have Known

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: ...

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How to Make Websites That Will Require Lots of Your Time and Energy

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...

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Occupation and Preoccupation

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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Measurement and Numbers

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...

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Computers Are a Feeling

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...

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Follow Up: An Analysis of YouTube Links From The White House’s “Wire” Website

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...

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Do You Even Personalize, Bro?

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...

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Setting Element Ordering With HTML Rewriter Using CSS

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...

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An Analysis of Links From The White House’s “Wire” Website

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...

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Transforming HTML With Netlify Edge Functions

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...

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Little Swarming Gnats of Data

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...

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My Copy of The Internet Phone Book

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...

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Becoming an Asshole

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...

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The Continuum From Static to Dynamic

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...

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The Web as URLs, Not Documents

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...

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Some Miscellaneous Thoughts on Visual Design Prodded By The Sameness of AI Company Logos

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...

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Notes from Andreas Fredriksson’s “Context is Everything”

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 ...

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Is It JavaScript?

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....

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Tradeoffs to Continuous Software?

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...

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Could I Have Some More Friction in My Life, Please?

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...