Hey friends,

Do school buses run on time?

No, they run on wheels.

(Unless you're like us and just completely miss the bus altogether 😬)

Thinking Too Hard 🤔

Do you keep an idea list? The kinds of things you think of at odd hours of the morning?

I've just compiled a year's worth of ramblings into a presentation on creativity (stay tuned, I'll post it once I remove the copyrighted images 😅). Now needing something new to ramble about, I went back to my idea list. Here are some of the items on it:

• Post-Apocalyptic Rat Fishing Game (I sort of remember what I meant by this)
• LSPs in NeoVim, a new primer
• Shaders (that's all I have written down, yet still a whole topic in itself)
• Empathy as a Developer
• "What to do when stuck in the hot seat"
• Smol Web Weird Web
• Eldritch Space Asteroids
• Energy as a remote worker
• "Pushing by Chunks, a Time Management Strategy"
• And many others...

Some of these seem relevant and promising, others are wacky and ambiguous (rat fishermen? 🐀🎣) or huge in scale. The point of the idea list is VOLUME.

Nick Bentley (now the President for Underdog Games) had a process he called the 100:10:1 method. (Here's a WayBack archive of the original post.) The gist is: write 100 wacky ideas, pick 10 to pursue in a minimally viable way, then take the single most promising idea and polish it until you can't anymore. By doing this, you'll find the flaws in the ideas and slowly steers you from the imaginative into the practical.

But it all starts with that list of ideas. Are you writing down your ideas? (Even your weird ones?)

Interesting Web Bits 🍜

Web Stuff

• I think we all agree cognitive load is what matters when writing code — but I also think we can argue endlessly on what ACTUALLY is easier to understand quickly. Don't agree? Just read the orange website comments.
• Baldur Bjarnason wonders if we'll see a slow evaporation of the open source surplus.
• "No, you don't want to hire the 'best' engineers..."
• Jim Nelson attempts to make sense of web casing conventions and ends with "Bless This Mess" 😂
• If you watched Star Trek: The Next Generation, then you know (also the beeps!)

Other Stuff

• Need a new font? What about one designed for airplane cockpits? ✈️
• An interesting runthrough of a social experiment, of 30 minutes with a stranger.
• I leave evidence of my passing with snack crumbs, apparently Lewis and Clark did it with heavy-metal laxatives.
• WATCH: Lego rollercoaster complete with corkscrew
• WATCH: Have you ever seen art made with bubbles? 🫧