Pavel Samsonov wrote this great thing about how Nike got bit by chasing the data instead of making a better product: It’s tempting to reach only for the data that’s easiest to harvest, and stop there. That’s exactly what Nike did with their online shopping data. As a result, their product priorities rapidly diverged...

DJR has published a fantastic reintroduction to Roslindale that digs into the history behind the type family and why this style is still relevant today: Fonts are subject to fashion, they ebb and flow just like tastes in music and clothing. And while some things fade away forever, others are always waiting to...

Democracies are the worst way to build a product. This is the reason why most tech companies are slow and ineffective: managers aren’t really there to make decisions, set a vision, or settle disputes. These sorts of organizations are designed explicitly not to make decisions as there’s no one you can point to in an...

I’ve been using Obsidian to write a story, partly for fun, partly as a de-stresser, but also to try my hand at a different form of writing. And one feature that I adore is the graph view which shows the relationships between your documents. So in each Obsidian doc, you can add links to another like this: [[Jupiter]]...

As I was walking around The Computer History Museum in Mountain View yesterday I couldn’t shake this one quote that I’d read earlier that morning: “The computer is a feeling,” says Tim Hwang and Omar Rizwan in their blog post manifesto, “not a device.” Instinctively, intuitively, I know what that computer-feeling...

The ugliest part about tech is the lingo, the language, the words that we use to describe our work and each other. It’s all super gross to me! For example, the way we describe the different kinds of work. In this world there are managers and “ICs”—individual contributors. Those are the folks who, ya know, get stuff...

Here’s a fantastic essay by Sloan all about the tour for his latest novel Moonbound (I’m reading it right now and I love it to bits). Robin writes: The venue for SF in SF is the American Bookbinders Museum, where beautiful old machines are lined up in the shadows. These used to be the highest tech. The first time...

I really like Christoph’s new website. It has everything: great visual hierarchy, great subdivision of space on big screens (something I struggle with!), and also great choice of GT Alpina for headings (I spotted that wonky, almost-falling-over lowercase a in less than a heartbeat). Clicking around, enjoying his...

...as a scientist and an explorer I have a duty to bear witness to the Splendours of the World. [...] The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite. Okay, that quote likely doesn’t mean anything to you but regardless of that, you just gotta read Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. I won’t spoil anything...

I’ve been thinking a lot about how the web is changing. Here’s Nilay Patel: There’s a theory I’ve had for a long time that I’ve been calling “Google Zero” — my name for that moment when Google Search simply stops sending traffic outside of its search engine to third-party websites. When I first heard this phrase I...

In the past I’ve watched designers hop from company to company every other year and thought to myself: Wow, what on earth are they doing? How can they possibly learn anything, how can they contribute anything meaningful to an organization if they’re stuck in an endless cycle of quitting and starting over again?...

Anil Dash: You might have noticed, it’s not a super fun time to be in the publishing industry, especially if you’re trying to do journalism. The years-long drumbeat of bad news issuing from nearly every newsroom has left people understandably despairing about what’s going to happen next. I’m not a Pollyanna; I don’t...