blog.jim-nielsen.com — Book Notes: “Poor Charlie’s Almanack”
I’ve been slowly listening to Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger. I like his practicality. He’s never trying to be...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — Something’s Rotten in the State of macOS Icon Design
This is an iconic observation: If you put the Apple icons in reverse it looks like the portfolio of someone getting really really good at icon design This...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — Building Software Requires Digestion
Here’s Scott Jenson in his insightful piece “The Ma of a New Machine”: the chatbot interface [makes us] feel like deep cognitive work is happening. But the...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — Out With the JS, In With the HTML
I’ve been posting about how you can make lots of HTML pages and leverage navigations over in-page, JS-dependent interactions. Now I’m gonna post another...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — Reminder: You Can Stitch Together Lots of Little HTML Pages With Navigations For Interactions
I wrote about building websites with LLMs — (L)ots of (L)ittle ht(M)l page(s) — and I think it’s time for a post-mortem on that approach: I like it. I’ve...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — Collective Speed Is Not the Summation of Individual Speed
I’ve been thinking about speed which is why Chris Coyier caught my attention in his latest piece discussing how AI might be 10✕ing the speed with which we...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — Hook It Up to the Machine
In the early 2000’s, my parents took us on a road trip to Glacier National Park in Montana. We made the journey in our new (used) family van: a green Dodge...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — Speed is Not Conducive to Wisdom
Speed has become the primary virtue of the modern world. Everything is sacrificed to it. Move fast (and break things, not as a goal but as a consequence)....
blog.jim-nielsen.com — That’s a Skill Issue
I quipped on BlueSky: It’s interesting how AI proponents are often like "skill issue" when the LLM doesn't work like someone expects. Whereas when human-...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — Fewer Computers, Fewer Problems: Going Local With Builds & Deployments
Me, in 2025, on Mastodon: I love tools like Netlify and deploying my small personal sites with git push But i'm not gonna lie, 2025 might be the year I go...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — Prototyping with LLMs
Did you know that Jesus gave advice about prototyping with an LLM? Here’s Luke 14:28-30: Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — I Tried Vibing an RSS Reader and My Dreams Did Not Come True
Simon Willison wrote about how he vibe coded his dream presentation app for macOS. I also took a stab at vibe coding my dream app: an RSS reader. To clarify:...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — The Blandness of Systematic Rules vs. The Delight of Localized Sensitivity
Marcin Wichary brings attention to this lovely dialog in ClarisWorks from 1997: He quips: this breaks the rule of button copy being fully comprehensible...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — Continuous, Continuous, Continuous
Jason Gorman writes about the word “continuous” and its place in making software. We think of making software in stages (and we often assign roles to...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — Code as a Tool of Process
Steve Krouse wrote a piece that has me nodding along: Programming, like writing, is an activity, where one iteratively sharpens what they're doing as they do...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — More Details Than You Probably Wanted to Know About Recent Updates to My Notes Site
I shipped some updates to my notes site. Nothing huge. Just small stuff. But what is big stuff except a bunch of small stuff combined? So small stuff is...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — Re: People Are Not Friction
Dave Rupert puts words to the feeling in the air: the unspoken promise of AI is that you can automate away all the tasks and people who stand in your way....
blog.jim-nielsen.com — You Might Debate It — If You Could See It
Imagine I’m the design leader at your org and I present the following guidelines I want us to adopt as a team for doing design work: Typography: Use...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — Food, Software, and Trade-offs
Greg Knauss has my attention with a food analogy in his article “Lose Myself”: A Ding Dong from a factory is not the same thing as a gâteau au chocolat et...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — Two of My Favorite Things Together at Last: Pies and Subdomains
I like pie. And I’ve learned that if I want a pie done right, I gotta do it myself. Somewhere along my pilgrimage to pie perfection, I began taking a photo...