Bluesky is good
Three months ago, I wrote Bluesky et al , in which I walked through the various platforms vying for the dubious title of "Twitter's successor" and landed on...
November, 2024
Not a lot to share this month; it was a particularly busy time, between a mystery (and now solved, without fanfare or closure) cough and a dearth of time to...
Writing from November
Not a lot to share this month; it was a particularly busy time, between a mystery (and now solved, without fanfare or closure) cough and a dearth of time to...
Letters to a Young Bartender
Every straight white male is forced, character-creation-screen-style, to choose one overtly consumptive hobby that in some small part defines their twenties...
Fathom
I'd been meaning to jot down some thoughts on Fathom for a while, and did not have a particularly good reason to do so until the news broke that Paul Jarvis...
Hidden settings are for cowards
At Stripe, we had two abstractions for branching logic in production: flags , which were meant to be explicitly temporal (temporarily split-testing traffic;...
Klarna: nineteen years, twenty billion kroner
I tend to ignore the entire genre of what we now refer to as BNPL businesses — Affirm, Afterpay (RIP), Klarna, et al — not for any particular sin I feel that...
A good H1
Buttondown was kindly featured in H1 Gallery last week , and Ryan asked me to opine a bit on how we arrived at our current iteration, which is the anodyne...
Shipping is capturing value
This great essay from Sean Goedecke went viral two weeks ago, drawing fury and fervor alike for a Moral Mazes -esque analysis of how engineers at large...
Bozos
Kevin Twohy has a list of heuristics for new projects/clients , and my favorite is simple: No Bozos. Simple policy. No exceptions. You know it when you see...
VC does not guarantee PMF
Two companies that I started following (with no small amount of envy) back in 2021: Hype (fka Pico) sold to an MMA-themed holdco earlier this year. Raised a...
October, 2024
Hello! Lots of writing in October (what early parenthood takes away in terms of deep flow, it gives back in terms of twenty-minute pockets of time and...
Meta's two assets
(Epistemic disclaimer: there are few Extremely Big Tech Companies to whom I feel apathy more vividly than Meta. I had a Facebook account in high school and...
Projects are things with steps
Lots of kind words poured in as a response to My approach to GTD and PKM , and one question was asked so frequently that I decided to write about it. Why is...
Notebook as marketing primitive
Earlier this week, I stumbled upon this brilliant marketing-slash-documentation idea from SingleStore — notebooks as a first-party page! There are a handful...
My approach to GTD and PKM
One pernicious thing with writing about productivity and knowledge systems: you only change systems that aren’t working, and you tend to write about things...
Consider the data product
The advice might seem dated these days, but I think the stair step approach to bootstrapping is evergreen: It’s much easier to sell an add-on to an existing...
You should build this:
A prior iteration of this site had a page called "Project ideas" that listed a bunch of things that I'd like to build. This was a good idea and useful in its...
Migrating to Django 5
The total LOC delta to migrate Buttondown from Django 4 to Django 5 was +143, -150. (I was incentivized to do so because our search right now is quite slow,...
Applied Cartography × People & Blogs
There are few pleasures greater than getting to be profiled for an interview series that you've been reading for months, and last week I got to do exactly...
Talking to customers
You say that these numbers mean dial it down. I say they mean dial it up. You haven't gotten through. There are people you haven't persuaded yet. These...
Notes on Zed, revisited
A little over six months ago, I wrote Notes on Zed . My conclusion at that time was that Zed made a lot of great choices and felt really good to use, but...
Two weeks of parenthood
We've had Lucy for two weeks, which qualifies us as experts, which means it is time to write about parenthood. (In all seriousness, consider the below...
Applied Cartography × Indie Rails
Chatted with Jess and Jeremy about a whole slew of things, from pricing strategy to terrifying and arcane differences between various Markdown parsers...
Updates from September
In descending order of importance: I had a daughter, Lucy, the light of my life. I launched a tiny side project, handbook.directory. I cautioned against...
Always use an enum for your status field
Reflecting on my early career, I learned that simple architectural choices save headaches later on.
Why your marketing site should be separate
In Notes on buttondown.com and How Buttondown uses HAProxy , I outlined the slightly kludgy way we serve buttondown.com both as a marketing site (public-...
MD5-based uniqueness constraints in Django
Yesterday, I was trying to set a unique constraint for comments in Buttondown to prevent accidental double-commenting, and I ran into a problem that I hadn't...
RSS in Next 14
We finished Buttondown ’s migration from MDX to Markdoc last week. It went swimmingly, except for one little hitch: our RSS feeds, which sat on top of...
Updates from August
Hello hello! Sorry for missing last month’s update: we are in the final throes of pre-paternity leave, and everything is trending in the right direction...
Updates from June
Lots of writing this month: RIP, BedkitCanned cocktailsZero draftWhere to hitch your wagonTypesafe routing in Vue And some media notes (it was again a rare...
Updates from May
Lots of writing this month: Why you should use Rails A reminder that things take time How shadcn/ui's previews work Why I hate that 1.01% meme A lovely term,...
Updates from April
Welcome to spring, bona fide and humid. Lots of writing this month: I wrote about spending the past two years as an independent technologist. On the media...
Updates from March
I did a good amount of writing and reading in March, as a much-needed change of pace. Buttondown work continues apace, too — less chaotic than January, not...
Updates from February
Hello! I am writing you from the theoretical auspices of a brand new personal website. (Yes, just like the one I launched last year. And in 2022.) No fancy...
Scattered Thoughts On Buying Software Businesses
I have published a new essay, my first of 2024. It is entitled, quite aptly and bluntly: Scattered Thoughts On Buying Software Businesses You can read it here.
2023 in Review
Happy New Year's Eve! I have published an essay (the first one in a while, I know!) in the infamous genre of "year in review post". It contains notes on:...
What Elephants Taste Like
When I wrote Befriending the Goon Squad — an essay on the importance of patience and discipline when building a product — I received dozens of variations of...
Befriending the Goon Squad
Hello, friends! I just published a new essay about building a software project for the long haul, and the merits in doing so. This essay is entitled...
Spoonbill (2016 — 2023)
(You can read this essay online here.) The start I would be lying to you if I told you I remember exactly what was going on when I came up with the idea for...