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Your Greatest Strength Is Also Your Greatest Weakness

Referring to product management, my old boss used to say, “There is no right or wrong, only trade-offs.” This applies to technology too (and, if you really think about it, life generally — but we won’t go that far). As an example, what makes npm great? It’s so easy to instal...

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Amazing Athletes of the 21st Century

This post is a secret to everyone! Read more about RSS Club. Content warning: wherein I talk about sports. If that’s not your thing, feel free to skip this one. I’m not a rabid sports fan. I don’t have a team, though I do have teams I hate (or rather, like to h...

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I Don’t Like The Term “IC” Either

I really liked Robin’s piece, “Stop calling yourself an IC”. I still remember the way I felt the first time I heard that term. It was used in a way where its connotations conveyed a kind of laziness via lack of ambition. And I thought, “But wait, I am an individual contribu...

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Text Prompts Circumscribe The Surface Area of Possible Solutions

I was reading Chase McCoy’s notes about Figma’s move into the AI space and this one line stuck out to me (emphasis mine): Generating UI designs from scratch, based on a text prompt This reminded me of my note from a Wall Street Journal interview with Jony Ive where he talk...

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Creating Some Noise on Behalf of Silence

How do you write about the value of silence? It’s kind of absurd when you think about it. Do you use words to extol the value of something whose essence is the very absence of words? It’s like making a painting of the invisible. Do you use visible means to depict something t...

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All About That Button, ’Bout That Button

In modern SPAs it’s common to immediately escape baked-in browser behaviors. For example, using <button> often looks like this: <div> <input type="text" name="q" /> <button type="submit" onClick={(e) => { // Stop the baked-in behavi...

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Digital Trees

Trees have many functions: they provide shade, they purify air, they store carbon, they grow fruit, and they’re aesthetically pleasing. What’s intriguing to me about trees is their return on investment (ROI). It takes years, even decades, to grow a tree to the point where...

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Cool URIs Don’t Change — But Humans Do

Here are two ideas at odds with each other: You should have human-friendly URIs Cool URIs don’t change If a slug is going to be human-friendly, i.e. human-readable, then it's going to contain information that is subject to change because humans make errors. If “to err is ...

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A Local-first Codebase Opens the Door to More Collaborators

I thought this was interesting: Dax Raad on the local-first podcast observes how a local-first model drastically simplifies the experience of building an app, both as an individual and as a team. He talks about how his wife is not an engineer but she learned to be more hands...

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Custom Elements Don’t Require a Hyphen as a Separator

Scott Jehl reached out to help me resolve a conundrum in my post about what constitutes a valid custom element tag. The spec says you can have custom elements with emojis in them. For example: <emotion-😍></emotion-😍> But for some reason the Codepen where I tested...