What Gives
Matthieu asks: Since you do a lot of things (investor, dad, owner of a "small" business, blog writer) I was wondering what you don't do to keep up with this...
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...
HQ1
Read essay: HQ1
The Flamethrowers
“Making art was really about the problem of the soul, of losing it. It was a technique for inhabiting the world. For not dissolving into it.”
Does that dependency spark joy?
If there's been one through line in changes to Buttondown's architecture over the past six months or so, it's been the removal and consolidation of...
That Thing You Do!
Ain't no way to keep a band together. Bands come and go. You got to keep on playin', no matter with who.
Recursive filter schema
When we added support for complex filtering in Buttondown, I spent a long time trying to come up with a schema for filters that felt sufficiently ergonomic...
Smoke test your Django admin site
Here is a confession: I am a very strong proponent of a robust test suite being perhaps the single most important asset of a codebase, but when it comes to...
Scaling People
A strategy should hurt. / Leadership is disappointing people at a rate they can absorb.
SABLE, fABLE
I have been going through a certain kind of reckoning with my previous self and the things that I loved back when I was an undergrad with fewer things on my...
Another reason our pytest suite is slow
I wrote two days ago about how our pytest suite was slow, and how we could speed it up by blessing a suite-wide fixture that was scoped to session. This was...
Pulumi
I'm spending a lot more time lately using Pulumi. This is for a handful of reasons. The two biggest ones are as follows.
Weeknotes 2.0
Once upon a time, I wrote weeknotes for Buttondown. I’ve started them up again—the first edition is linked below. I’ll spare you the navel-gazing about...
Fixing CSS variables in Superhuman
Part of running a business like Buttondown is spending more time than you'd like installing esoteric email clients and trying to debug odd rendering...
Long Story Short
Long Story Short, feels like in many ways a synthesis of everything Raphael and Lisa have been trying to do and say, packaged in a slightly more mature and...
Anywhere
Yawning Portal has produced one of my favorite songs of all time, which is a very ambient remix of Cut to the Feeling. The EP which included this remix had a...
The Quiet American
When he saw a dead body he couldn't even see the wounds.
Site 2026
Welcome to the latest version of my website. Continuing my annual tradition, I've rebuilt the site with a new platform and design—this time by developing my...
The Ghost
All good books are different but all bad books are exactly the same. I know this to be a fact because in my line of work I read a lot of bad books - books so...
Diner
Read review: Diner