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...
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. First, we're ramping up our...
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...
Why our pytest suite is slow
The speed of Buttondown's pytest suite (which I've written about here, here, and here) is a bit of a scissor for my friends and colleagues: depending on who...
63 postcards
We have wrapped up the formal portion of DjangoCon. DjangoCon is not Buttondown's first conference that we've sponsored, but it is the first one that we've...
Django forever
Tomorrow, I am taking a very early morning flight to Chicago to attend DjangoCon US. Buttondown is sponsoring, less as an exercise in lead generation and...
Onboarding survey, one week in
One extremely compelling form of blogging, both for the reader and the writer, is the admission of defeat. Seriously: whenever you find yourself faced with...
Goodwill
One of the amazing things about Morrowind is that it's a combat-rich game in which you can feasibly go through much of the game without ever fighting;...
August, 2025
The summer heat in Richmond clung to everything this August like a second skin, broken only by afternoon thunderstorms that sent Telemachus scurrying to his...
August, 2025
The summer heat in Richmond clung to everything this August like a second skin, broken only by afternoon thunderstorms that sent Telemachus scurrying to his...
What follows GitHub?
It seems fairly clear that, as far as product lifecycle goes, GitHub is in its “Azure metered billing” stage. I don’t mean this as a negative value judgment...
Ashland, 2025
Trundle is not quite the right word. When I hear trundle, I think of layers, of wool and dampness, of hitting the road before the sun does, wrapped in a...
Three apps that will not change your life
After what has felt like a long winter of habitual reliance on my existing tools, I’m finally playing around with some new ones. This is a healthy habit—so...
July 2025
Telemachus turned five, two weeks ago. He did not have a great July; Richmond's been roiled by storms (ten nights in the past two weeks have ended with him...
July, 2025
Telemachus turned five, two weeks ago. He did not have a great July; Richmond's been roiled by storms (ten nights in the past two weeks have ended with him...
Have you at least tried asking?
My wife got sick this past weekend, and as a result we had to cancel or at least postpone a trip to Seattle that we had been looking forward to. She's...
Bodies Bodies Bodies
More than anything else, Bodies Bodies Bodies is a perfectly reasonable and delightful way to spend 90 minutes. It is beautiful, well-acted, and consistently...
Post-Watch
There was a point in my life where I was excited about the Apple Watch. I think in no small part because it represented a new frontier in consumer...
The year of mint chimichurri
This is the fifth summer that we've stayed in Richmond since moving back east, and therefore also the fifth soilday of our backyard garden. Our garden is not...
VC-subsidized tokens
Simon Willison writes about the recent Cursor changes: Firstly, the era of VC-subsidized tokens may be coming to an end, especially for products like Cursor...