Latest posts
- Speed is Not Conducive to WisdomApr 15, 2026
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 by the real world. An idea destroyed by its own shortsightedness. Experiencing these can be slow and uncomfortable, but if you
- That’s a Skill IssueApr 12, 2026
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 mind because I’ve been working with Jan Miksovsky on his project Web Origami and he exemplified this to me recently. I was wor
- Fewer Computers, Fewer Problems: Going Local With Builds & DeploymentsApr 09, 2026
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 builds work on my machine and I have to spend that extra bit of time to ensure they also work on remote linux computers. Not
- Prototyping with LLMsApr 06, 2026
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 to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule you, saying, ‘This person began to build and wasn’t able to finish.’ That pre
- I Tried Vibing an RSS Reader and My Dreams Did Not Come TrueApr 05, 2026
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 kind of always wanted to try an app where my RSS feed is just a list of unread articles and clicking any one opens it in the
- The Blandness of Systematic Rules vs. The Delight of Localized SensitivityApr 02, 2026
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 Register/Register Later/Register Now would solve that problem, but wouldn’t look so neat. This got me thinking about how you
- Continuous, Continuous, ContinuousMar 30, 2026
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 phase, the release phase, and so on. However this approach to building and distributing software isn’t necessarily well-suited t
- Code as a Tool of ProcessMar 24, 2026
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 improvement, i.e. sharpening, to be had through the process of iteratively building something. As you bring each aspect of a f
- More Details Than You Probably Wanted to Know About Recent Updates to My Notes SiteMar 22, 2026
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 make and account for along the way to shipping. For me, the small details are the fun part! Each Post Now Has Its Own URL Th
- Re: People Are Not FrictionMar 20, 2026
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 designers or engineers first. Designers empowered by AI might feel those pesky nay-saying, opinionated engineers aren’t needed anymore