I can’t stop thinking about a series of blog posts by Eleanor Janega I read a couple of months ago. The first is called There’s no such thing as the ‘Dark Ages’, but OK, where she writes: The medieval period was not a period of stagnation, it was a time of progress. Wait, what? That’s not what I thought! This is...

Watch out: a new website appears! Yesterday I published the ninenteeth official version of this website and this time round it’s inspired by the work I’ve done on developer tools these last few years. It’s my own personal IDE: you can navigate files, open up folders, and see how I’d organize an operating system. My...

It’s 4am and I’m waiting for the sunrise. I can’t remember the last time I did this—perhaps back in college after the season finale of Lost? But right now it’s pitch black outside. I can’t sleep thanks to the jet lag and my body’s stubborn inability to sleep on long haul flights so I’m sat in our hotel room that...

I’ve been thinking about the web and how it’ll change with the increasingly…uh…worrying decline of search. It feels like the order of their results can no longer be trusted, the web no longer reliably scraped. Instead, this essential tool we’ve relied on for more than two decades has halted all progress, reversed...

I love this time of year for the satisfying blocks of website tinkering. There are big mornings and long afternoons spent with a new CSS feature. Or a whole weekend rewriting the about page, fixing dark mode, poking, prodding. Every morning I head to a cafe and see what’s possible. Being productive or making...

Redesigning this website over the weekend gave me a curious feeling. It was a deeply cozy one, as if my work sits on a continuum of all the other websites and books every made. As if my work is a link in a long chain through time. You’ll likely spot the inspiration right away: this redesign took an LLM copyright...

Adventure games had all the best characters growing up. George Stobbart. Nico Collard. Guybrush Threepwood. Elaine Marley. Then a few decades later we got Harry Dubois and Kim Kitsuragi. I love adventure games because they consistently do this magic thing where you enter into the minds of these characters. Just like...

Have you played Viewfinder yet? I picked it up last night on a whim and I wasn’t prepared for how brilliantly designed and creative and straight-up weird it all is. Here’s the gist: the game is about solving little puzzles by taking photographs and then “pasting” those objects into the real world. So a photo of a...

Over the past couple of years I’ve noticed that 90% of my design feedback comes down to these three things: Ditch those words! Ditch those words! Ditch those words! It’s the fastest way to make a design more easily understood because almost every interface tries to explain too much at the wrong time and is far too...

There are books and then there are books. The kind where you can’t put down until they’re finished with you. The kind that captures every atom of your attention and changes something deep down. You walk away altered, the words having not really been words or sentences but something else altogether. That’s how I felt...

It often feels like optimism is an act of revenge, an act of spite or rebellion, because optimism requires diligence and effort whilst pessimism feels like the default, the thing requiring no energy or effort. Mike Monteiro wrote along similar lines in How to stay hopeful: The problem with dystopias is that...

Long time, huh? Lately I’ve felt the need to lay low, to hush myself, to be as quiet as a door mouse. Whilst the world feels so very loud and brash and full of words, stepping away from the Infinite Word Machine that is the internet has been helpful to ask some tough questions about my relationship with reading and...