Evergreen

To subscribe to new posts, follow the RSS feed for my site. If you don’t know how to use RSS, don’t worry, that link has instructions. I strongly recommend using RSS to subscribe to all your favourite websites.

If you’re a sicko who actually prefers e-mail, I have a Substack where I announce new essays. Just essays though, not other writing like riffs and notes. So I don’t particularly recommend it over RSS.

The list below consists of long content made up of essays and notes that I hope will always be worth reading. The bold items are essays, while the rest are guides, notebooks, or curated collections of things.

Visit the Changelog page for a reverse-chronological list of all site updates (including changes in design).

Software

I am a self-taught programmer (insofar as learning from people’s writing can be called “self-taught”) and approach it as a very serious hobbyist. I’ve historically been very interested in Local-first Software and adjacent topics like Databases (duh).

Advice

Unfortunately, Bad Advice has proved to be one of my most popular posts. To clarify, I do mean it when I say you shouldn’t do these things — I only list them because I’ve seen them work out well. Actually helpful advice can be found in Pro Tips and the Project Management notebook.

Recs

Of all the collections I’ve curated, I’m particularly proud of my (hand-saved) Twitter Bookmarks and my gallery of mobile Screenshots. The rest are quite good too:

Design

I coined the term Interface Anxiety, and it continues to be one of my main focuses when designing apps. Software Design Ideas I Dislike is a good “via negativa” description of my overall approach to design.

AI

Agents Need Work Data was co-written with Anjali Shrivastava. We still stand by most of it, but it needs some editing re. some of the specifics (e.g. labs seem to be relying on data & environment vendors more than their own product traces).

i feel dizzy (again) is an essay about my reactions to AI progress between 2022–2024.

Economics

Most things in the world are a function of tradeoffs, coordination costs and mechanisms, and the exchange of value. How can one help but think about them?