Today was a big day. I’ve spent the last two and a half years at Gusto working on a side project that’s finally drawing to a close. It’s nothing exceptional, and it doesn’t change the world. But it makes our design system 1% better. 1% easier to maintain. 1% easier to understand. If I can leave the office every day...

Some friends dragged me to the Brava Theater in the Mission on Friday evening to watch a live version of The Allusionist, the podcast by Helen Zaltzman all about language. The evening was entirely perfect and I immediately felt guilty for not having listened to her podcast before. Everything about it is funny and...

If we’ve ever met then you already know that one my favorite films is Nick Cave’s 20,000 Days on Earth which is part documentary and part autobiographic visual essay. Throughout the film Nick talks about his writing, his music making, how he met Kylie Minogue, and how he fell in love with his wife. His friends will...

I love this story about debugging so dang much that I want a whole television series about these sorts of issues: The technicians, despite their best efforts, could not reproduce the bug in test settings: this bug seemed only to happen in the middle of large print jobs. So, on the off chance that this was a hardware...

This post by Chris all about the growing rift in the front-end development community is worth every second of your time as not only does it reveal the arguments we’ve been having over the last couple of years but it also shows just how complicated the web has become: Is there any solution to these problems of...

I’m an inconsistent person. I’m in love with multiple exes at once and it bothers me. I’m not always funny, I’m not always charming. I let things slip. My weight, the way I dress. These things need constant attention and, well, I tend to lose track of things. My biggest fault must be that I fall in love far too...

I can’t remember the last time a book felt like this. It’s the sort of book that makes you want to quit your job and set up camp in bed for the day solely in order to get to the next scene, the next page, to discover what happens next. Well, The Sisters Brothers is certainly a book of that type for me. It’s a novel...

I like this post by Georgy Marchuk on a minimal JavaScript setup but I especially like this bit where Georgy describes the difficulty of writing software as a group: The success of a development team starts with an agreement. An agreement of how things are done. Without an agreement, code would get messy, and the...

I adore Mary Beard’s latest book Women and Power. It’s a slim volume but that makes it the perfect size for Mary to keep you gripped to the edge of your seat as she compares sexism in modernity to that of the ancients. In one glorious passage she writes: We have to be more reflective about what power is, what it is...

We’re not in Los Angeles, Ali reminds me for maybe the fiftieth time as she unlocks her phone and points to the map. “This bit is Orange County, this bit is LA.” She’s mad and tells me I’m an idiot yet somehow it’s a mark of respect, a mark of true friendship even, that she calls me out for being lazy. “I dunk...

The other day I was reading Craig Mod’s article all about the Future Book where he briefly mentioned Matt Taibbi’s latest venture: Hate, Inc. This is a newsletter published via Substack (that charges $40 for a yearly subscription) but the exciting thing about this is that Matt is publishing whole books via these...

For the past couple of days I’ve been using You Need A Budget, a web app that’s designed around a rather simple premise: every dollar you earn should have a job, whether that’s paying for dumb stuff like video games, or paying off student debt, or buying coffee or food. That simple premise makes an enormous...