Always use an enum for your status field
When I was first starting my career at Amazon — even more bright-eyed and rosy-cheeked than I am now — I was thrilled by the concept of an "architecture...
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...
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...