April 2, 2024

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 so peaceful that I’m quite caught up on sleep.

Essays

Use weird tests to capture tacit knowledge, on a tactic that I stole from Stripe in terms of encapsulating arcane rules within unit tests.

Media

• Blitzed through the entire Len Deighton trilogy of Berlin Game, Mexico Set, and London Match — a delightful series if you’re at all entertained by “spy stuff”.
• Blue Eye Samurai, a show with many flaws but not enough to outweigh its many fine qualities
• Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, a miracle of a production and a trip down memory road
• Devs, a slog with some moments of beauty and genius
• Dune: Part 2, which sits in my mind as the apogee of blockbuster science fiction
• The Late Show, one of the worst noir films I’ve ever seen
• Attack on Titan (Season 4), a season of television with some terrific action sequences and legitimate laugh-out-loud moments of sheer incoherent plotting
• Austerlitz, the greatest book I have read in two or three years
• Superforecasting, a book I realized too late falls into the ignominious bucket of Airport Nonfiction

Notes

• Quick thoughts on three new tools that I have been using: Keystatic, Kolo and Zed
• There’s no such thing as a zero-marginal-cost free tier
• How to set up globals in Histoire
• A brief screed on “techno-optimism”
• Some idle questions, like is cool enough? and are monopolies bad?
• Navelgazing on why I want to grow Buttondown even though it’s at a perfectly reasonable size
• Two invocations of Tailwind black magic: one on tables, one on pointer events.