I took a little time off last week and for a couple of days I headed up to Oregon on my bike. Together we drove through swooping valleys and up into snow-capped mountains, around twisty rock faces and great empty plains; every moment was thoroughly breathtaking. Although I didn’t take pictures of the most memorable...

For years I lived happily without a Facebook account and it was only in 2016 that I finally signed up after wanting to experiment more with Messenger for an upcoming hiking trip with some friends. Recently though I’ve considered leaving Facebook, for a variety of reasons, and returning home to the dark rock that I...

I got to reading this excellent post called How to Make a Book the other day and it’s a collection of advice from writers and novelists about how to get started with a book of your own: A book can be inspired by nearly anything: a seemingly stray thought you can’t shake, a lyric, an overheard conversation, another...

David Foster Wallace wrote a wonderful piece on the campaign trail of John McCain back in 2000. He describes the way that we’ve been hurt by politics and how that creates a sense of listlessness and ennui: It’s ultimately just about that complicated: it hurts. We learn this at like age four – it’s grownups’ first...

First you notice the city. San Francisco from 30,000 feet is a tiny holdout at the very tip of a cloudy peninsula. As you begin to descend you’ll see bridges and ocean, mountains and hills, as well as a patchwork quilt of skyscrapers at the northernmost tip. But from this height it’s still a city, just like the...

Karin Tidbeck’s Jagannath is a collection of stories that I’ve been utterly obsessed with over the last couple of weeks. Although it’s a small book, I’ve been ever so slowly chewing on each and every story because I don’t want it to end. One of the more extraordinary things about the book however is that Karin...

Liu Cixin’s Three Body Problem is one of the strangest things I’ve ever read. It’s a sci-fi novel set during the throes of the Cultural Revolution and focuses on a Chinese researcher who makes contact with an alien civilization. It’s the sort of topic that’s been partly written about to death, however! Liu’s book is...

Earlier today I wrote a quick review for Adventures all about Jez Burrows’ new book Dictionary Stories. It’s a lovely book and I hope my review cajoles, hood winks and tricks you into picking up a copy. Here’s a quick snippet from the introduction where Jez writes about his experience writing it: Spend the better...

Of all the things my father tried to introduce me to, only one thing has ever stuck. There was no David Bowie or Lou Reed LP, and there was no Scotland, Spain or trip to northern France that could seduce me. Neither was there a sip of cognac or shooting escapade where I could sit back and enjoy myself. All of those...

I’m reading this post on the value of time by Paul Ford again and dammit it’s the sort of writing that makes me reel with envy: The only unit of time that matters is heartbeats. Even if the world were totally silent, even in a dark room covered in five layers of foam, you’d be able to count your own heartbeats. When...

At Gusto we’ve been building our design system for the past two years and thinking about how to scale our product and design process across multiple complex projects and teams. So whether you’re just starting out building a complicated front-end, or if you’re getting ready to build a style guide at a large...

This piece by Kai Stinchcombe on why blockchain is a terrible idea is pretty dang quotable—he tackles the crazy idea that blockchain is a magical technology wand that you can wave around and solve the “trust problem” between groups of people. My favorite point is this one though: A lawless and mistrustful world...