Hey friends,

Spooky, or rather, spoopy season is upon us. My neighbors love creating scenes with skeletons, and they're quite good! Featured in this year's decorations are: the lift from Dirty Dancing, a skeleton losing an umbrella, and some skeleton burglars breaking into a house.

💀🦴💀

Thinking Too Hard 🤔

“If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking.” - Leslie Lamport

As we continue exploring how to keep our opinions and thinking sharp, how does writing help us here?

I don't know about y'all, but when I sit down to write, I often find the ideas in my head are NOT as well defined once on paper. A few weeks ago I linked a study that helped popularize the idea that writing isn't a sequence of stages; it's a dynamic set of mental processes that constantly interact. The act of writing itself changes what you think you're trying to say. You have to go back and take a critical look at your ideas. Not only that, but other studies show that writing IMPROVES your understanding of what you're writing about.

"So what, Nathan?" you might be thinking, "You want me to start blogging?" Well, yes. I do want that, ultimately, BUT writing doesn't have to be public to gain these benefits. I've written about private project logs before, but even more important is taking a few minutes to write down what you're learning. It can be in a freeform, handwritten journal, or a structured wiki (like Tiddlywiki, Notion, or Obsidian). The format isn't important as long as it encourages writing and can be accessed quickly.

If you don't write much, I would encourage you to start writing down things you're learning, random thoughts, incomplete plans, basically whatever passes through your head. Write it down in a shared place for a while and see what happens.

Interesting Web Bits 🍜

Web Stuff

• The State of Dev 2026 survey results are in! Overall, we're exhausted yet bored, poorly managed but generally happy, and split on the looming shadow of AI. Still sad to see so much gender discrimination...
• Carson Gross (creator of HTMX) responds to the question of "Given AI, should I still consider becoming a computer programmer?".
• Kevin Liao argues agents don't need memory, they need documentation.
• Karl Koch thinks about giving fluid interfaces an anchor. I wonder what would happen if the original animation grew UP instead of DOWN, leaving the choices in about the same area...?

Other Stuff

• Some of the examples may be a little contrived, but there's definitely a convergence of design happening

👽 Weird, 📺 Watch, and 🎮 Play

• 👽 A beautiful gallery of animated ASCII art pieces
• 👽 I love the specificity of Big Words
• 👽 Just in case you wanted to know: What is Earth's dominant species by mass (and it's probably not what you think it is!)