I can’t remember the last time I felt quite like this. There’s a sense that everything’s on track and progress is being made; my day to day work isn’t quite as scary as it was a year ago (in fact now I’m beginning to feel like this whole career of mine might’ve been a good idea after all) also I’m feeling like my...

I really like this post by Jeremy Keith on the difference between under and over-engineering: Ubiquity; universality; accessibility—however you want to label it, it’s what lies at the heart of the World Wide Web. It’s the idea that anyone should be able to access a resource, regardless of technical or personal...

Dorothy Thompson, writing in 1941 about a particularly terrifying game called Who Goes Nazi: It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many...

Robin Sloan on his novel Sourdough and the author M.F.K Fischer for FSG: And for me, voice is the thing. In a novel, I will forgive any flaw, overlook any omission, if the voice on the page has that sizzling Tesla-coil energy. A book in which nothing happens is fine—it’s great!—if the voice is magnetic. M. F. K....

Jared Spool on the harmful measurement of NPS, the metric that many businesses use, especially in the Bay Area, to define customer satisfaction: We can’t reduce user experience to a single number this is the biggest flaw of NPS. It tries to achieve an outcome that can’t be achieved. It’s appealing to our management...

I can’t stop thinking about this piece by Jiayang Fan for the New Yorker all about obsession and celebrity worship and Chinese social networks: In China, he felt, it is still possible for celebrity worship to capture the entire culture. “Some of my students regard it as the defining feature of their existence, the...

Joe Fassler on writing, focus and disconnecting from the web: As twenty-first-century first-world humans, our first act in the morning is to check our phones—the nineteenth-century word we use to familiarize the glowing portals we carry with us, windowpanes we caress until they show us what we want. But writing, by...

This is just the sort of thing she would hate. Sentimentality, high fives, and any sort of public boasting is not her style and after finding out that I wrote something as nostalgic and emotional like this about her then she’s very likely to send me a blunt reply along the lines of ಠ_ಠ. But looking back over my...

Andrew Winston writing for Ev’s blog: ...consider the way so many Americans talk about government, like it’s some external group. It’s bizarre. We are government — it’s our shared responsibility. Our neighbors, friends, family, and ourselves work in the government keeping our complicated society going. Dismissing...

Shakespeare was not a genius. He was, without the distant shadow of a doubt, the most wonderful writer who ever breathed. But not a genius. No angels handed him his lines, no fairies proofread for him. Instead, he learnt techniques, he learnt tricks, and he learnt them well. This is how Mark Forsyth’s The Elements...

At Gusto I’ve been working on a spreadsheet interface that’s a little complicated and elaborate but it got me to wondering how we might build the simplest responsive spreadsheet possible with nothing more than CSS and so I wrote about it for CSS-Tricks. It’s kinda nifty that there’s a wide range of UI tricks that no...

The other day Tim Brown noticed that this old post had been deleted and so I rescued it from the Wayback Machine. It’s a post from several years ago where I wrote about a new typesetting system that we had developed at Erskine. Please note that most of this code wasn’t written by me, but I did contribute to some of...