February, 2025
What a start to the year! January was a bit more flat-packed than I think Haley and I would have otherwise liked, but all with great things. (Highlights...
What's in a name
Guillermo posted this recently: What you name your product matters more than people give it credit. It's your first and most universal UI to the world....
Truncating timedeltas in Django
Consider a fan-out-ish model that you want to aggregate a bunch of: likes on a post, for instance. class Post(models.Model): created_at =...
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...