Jack Cheng: Fiction is a backdoor into a communal vision. A novel – maybe every novel – is a prototype of the future. And if the ideas that the tech industry is pursuing feel stagnant, feel from the same old paratactic lists, maybe it points to a shortage of compelling fictions for what the world could be.

The other day our landlord walked into our apartment. Just opened the door right up and headed in. They were here to fix a problem we’d never heard about, and then they began to moan about the maintenance of the building. Oh, the upkeep! Oh, the leaves from down the street! Oh, the humanity — how hard it is to be a...

I’ve been doing a lot of interviews for designers lately so here’s a list of all the questions I’m asking along the way and maybe this helps someone out there looking for a design gig. Beware though! I have “failed” ten thousand design interviews and screeners and portfolio reviews. But like Dave, I’ve been...

“Are you okay, dad?” It was 7am and I found him hunched over the table in the kitchen with papers scattered all over the place. His hair was frazzled and his neck was red. I guess he had been up writing all night, scribbling frantically with that bulky fountain pen of his. I don’t think he heard me, so I asked...

Last week I ran a fun exercise: I wanted to take a week off work and build out The Cascade, the almost-weekly-ish newsletter that I’ve written about front-end development and CSS, and turn it into a full blow standalone honest-to-goodness blog. I gave myself 2 days for the design, 2 days for development, and 2 days...

I zipped through Better Onboarding by Krystal Higgins a few weeks ago and, in my mind, it’s a classic that should be required reading for anyone who makes software. I am serious! It is very good! I can’t remember the last time a book about my job has been so obviously good and un-put-downable and almost infinitely...

Writing is often seen as a tool for teaching or informing, lecturing atop a golden soapbox. But all the best writers I know don’t care much for writing as communication as much as they do writing for just heckin’ figuring things out or for learning how they feel about something in the process of angrily clacking on...

Two e-essays for your consideration! The first is Models All The Way Down by Christo Buschek and Jer Thorp. It’s all about LAION-5B and the enormous corpus of questionable data that’s used to train AI models under the hood. Here’s the kicker: ...how do you investigate something that takes lifetimes to look at? Yes,...

DJR just released Indoor Kid, a new variable font for typesetting dialogue in comic books and there’s a bunch of lovely things to note about it. First, I love the idea of a type specimen being a comic book! Second, having an emphasis slider sounds neat as hell: Ellis also requested a custom Emphasis axis that would...

Whenever I’m in a room without a whiteboard I feel trapped. Perhaps this is just the way I have to think through a problem but I can’t breakdown ideas or solutions without a whiteboard or a glass window to draw on. In fact, I’d say that the most unproductive conversations I’ve had with folks is simply down to the...

Elizabeth Goodspeed: I’ve come to believe that developing taste is not so unlike going to therapy; it’s an inefficient, time-consuming process that mostly entails looking inward and identifying whatever already moves you. It’s the product of devouring ideas, images and pieces of culture not because someone you...

Being on the other side of design systems now as a product designer is super interesting. I kinda hate the rules and regulations and nitpicking! And if I can’t lean into the system then I will fight against it with every fiber of my being. Although, this wasn’t always the case: in a previous life and as a designer...