“Am I taking this seriously enough?” I ask myself. You know, ~this~; the words and the typing, the becoming-a-writer-slowly-over-time thing. I put pen to paper maybe a couple of times a week but do I spend hours a day writing in hopes of being not only good at this thing, but great? No. I’m sat on my porch reading...

Here’s a video essay about “following people from afar on the Internet” called Fraidycat, which also happens to be the name of a desktop app and browser extension for following hundreds of people on whatever platform they’re on. If you like an artist on Youtube for example, or a writer and their blog, then Fraidycat...

Helen Macdonald’s novel H Is for Hawk is infuriating because it’s overwhelmingly kind and has just the sort of style that I often shoot for in Adventures. It hops and skips along, without a mean bone in its body. There’s so much momentum to every paragraph, every sentence, that you cannot help but become infatuated...

Here’s some good writing advice and tough love from Hugh Howey where he discusses being in a writing room for a TV show and how it applies to his work in books: I figured out a long time ago that it’s often better to delete entire chapters and start with a blank page than it is to fix a story that’s gone awry. It’s...

Over the Christmas break I read a book about underground places called Underland where Robert Macfarlane investigates mines, caves, burial sites, and even ventures deep into the network of tunnels beneath Paris. For the most part I enjoyed it, yet every so often I found myself wincing and bracing for impact...

Dave Rupert mentioned the other day that he had made a page on his website that gathers his most recent favorites from Feedbin and lets you scroll through them or even subscribe to them. I thought this was such a great idea that I decided to rip it off entirely! First up, you’ll need to head to Feedbin > Settings >...

Dorian Taylor has written an outstanding piece about making software and project management. He rushes out of the gate with the following sentence: The Agile Manifesto is an immune response on the part of programmers to bad management. I could not agree more. In fact, I think this piece about making software is the...

This is an interesting and honest post by Craig Mod on how his paid membership program faired in 2019. He breaks down his costs and what advice he would give to other writers/artists who are interested in becoming more independent. I particularly like this bit, too: I am tremendously grateful to everyone who has...

Paul wrote this lovely piece that riffs on my thoughts about why software is bad and the the cool thing about it? Paul disagrees with me! He argues in part that building great software will always require some degree of communication and planning: I’m currently helping design a service for the Department for...

Although I’ve argued before that software development is suffering from extreme mismanagement, I hadn’t thought much about how the structure of a company plays into the quality of the software; the way tasks are filtered down to underlings, the way that decisions are made, the thick layer of mismanagement in...

Jonnie Hallman’s newly redesigned personal site is rather lovely as it’s sort of like a little essay all about him and his work. It’s the perfect introduction to the history of his web design and development career and I might steal a bunch of his ideas for a redesign of my own. Anyway, he’s been blogging...

I love this story from Eric Meyer about building a website that looks as if it was from the 1900s and almost getting fired in the process: The young’uns in the audience won’t remember this, but to avoid loss of data and services when the year rolled from 1999 to 2000, pretty much the entire computer industry was...