blog.jim-nielsen.com — This Page Left Intentionally Blank
I was popping off about negation being an act of creativity, when Blake Watson introduce me to the idea of the “This Page Intentionally Left Blank”-Project...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — Notes from Bryan Cantrill’s “Intelligence is not Enough”
I quite enjoyed this talk from Bryan Cantrill where he discusses the difficult engineering problems they overcame while working on their company Oxide. Some...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — My Om Malik Story
If you have’t heard, Om Malik passed away. People are sharing stories of their graceful encounters with him. This one is mine. Back at the beginning of 2021,...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — Blogging Can Just Be Stating The Obvious
John Gruber writes about those annoying popups every website seems to have now and while he does a great job tearing into these ubiquitous, user-hostile...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — Consistency, But in Excellence Not Appearance
Consistency serves a purpose in visual design, but it seems to have become the purpose of a lot of visual design. Look no further than these evolutions of...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — Full Page Paralysis
You’ve probably heard the term. It’s meant to convey how difficult it can be to start something. “Blank page paralysis”. But for my money, beginning is easy....
blog.jim-nielsen.com — Being “Good” at Things
Golf content on social media is my online junk food and the other day I came across a video interviewing professional golfers that asks: “What does an...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — Coding Is Designing
Code isn’t just a way to implement a design, it’s a way to find one. With an interface, you have to use it, feel it, interact with it, and poke at it to see...
blog.jim-nielsen.com — An Ode to the Exacting Pedantry of Computers
The very first computer programming class I ever took introduced me to the idea of there being different kinds of numbers, like integers, floats, and doubles...
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...