I made some updates to my notes blog, including a change to how my “Shuffle” feature worked. Figured I’d blog about it. Shuffle? On a Blog? At the time of this writing, I have 974 “notes” that I’ve published. For fun, I have a “shuffle” button that digs up a random note from the past. I like to press it from time to...

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 (Internet Archive): In former times printed manuals had some blank pages, usually with the remark “this page intentionally left blank”. In most cases there had...

I quite enjoyed this talk from Bryan Cantrill where he discusses the difficult engineering problems they overcame while working on their company Oxide. Some of the problems they ran into were bugs. But these weren’t any ordinary bugs, they were company-destroying bugs: bugs that, if they couldn’t be fixed, would...

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, I set a goal to write 72 blog posts. I was puttering along, publishing whatever came to mind, mostly figuring that nobody was reading any of it. But that was...

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 patterns, one of the things that stood out to me about his piece was this meta commentary on blogging. Here’s John: If you visit a website you should ... see the...

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 macOS icons (image courtesy of BasicAppleGuy): The Creator Studio icons are undeniably consistent visually: rounded rectangles, controlled gradients, simplified...

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. Finishing is the hard part. In software, they call it “the last 90%”. In logistics, they call it “the last mile”. It’s that final stretch that’s...

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 amateur golfer have to shoot to be considered good?” It’s a leading question because the phrasing implicitly frames a number as the answer for a qualitative...

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 the relationships between things. Change X, see Y react. If it doesn’t feel right, tweak it. Change X again, now Y reacts differently. Better. Keep tweaking —...

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 (it was a C++ course). “You mean, when I assign a variable, I have to say up front what kind of number this is?” It was such an odd concept to me. A number is...

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 overly academic, as if he needs to prove how smart he is. He says Berkshire’s success doesn’t come from them solving hard problems, but from spending their time...

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 isn’t, however, just the story of Apple’s Creator Studio icons. It’s the unfolding story of icon design across the entire macOS platform. For example, take a look...