January 2025
Hello, 2025! (As always, Death Cab remains the soundtrack by which you should read this.) Headlining this month was my annual review; everything else is...
January, 2025
Hello, 2025! (As always, Death Cab remains the soundtrack by which you should read this.) Headlining this month was my annual review; everything else is...
Order, Tailwind, DRY
(Order in the CSS rule sense, not the metaphysical sense.) The time has come to begin exfiltrating some higher-traffic, higher-leverage parts of Buttondown's...
Linear
I invited nickd to join our Linear instance yesterday, which reminded me that I had a slew of notes I wanted to publish on our own experience of migrating...
Applied Cartography × Val Town
Had a blast live-coding some experimentations with Steve and Shovel yesterday using Val Town. (If you haven't used Val, well, watch the stream — think live,...
buttondown.com/alternatives
Some kind words from Chris Krycho on Buttondown's Alternatives page: This is how I want all my tools to be. There is a ton of room in these markets for...
Hypermodern Django
I've been on the hunt for a new way to dogfood Buttondown for the past month or so, and I've finally found it: Hypermodern Django. At this point, all of...
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...
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...