Feed - Applied Cartography

Order, Tailwind, DRY 🔗

(Order in the CSS rule sense, not the metaphysical sense.) The time has come to begin exfiltrating some higher-traffic, higher-leverage parts of Butto [...]

Linear 🔗

I invited nickd to join our Linear instance yesterday, which reminded me that I had a slew of notes I wanted to publish on our own experience of migra [...]

buttondown.com/alternatives 🔗

Some kind words from Chris Krycho on Buttondown's Alternatives page: This is how I want all my tools to be. There is a ton of room in these markets fo [...]

Hypermodern Django 🔗

I've been on the hunt for a new way to dogfood Buttondown for the past month or so, and I've finally found it: Hypermodern Django. At this point, all [...]

Bluesky is good 🔗

Three months ago, I wrote Bluesky et al, in which I walked through the various platforms vying for the dubious title of "Twitter's successor" and land [...]

November, 2024 🔗

Not a lot to share this month; it was a particularly busy time, between a mystery (and now solved, without fanfare or closure) cough and a dearth of t [...]

Letters to a Young Bartender 🔗

Every straight white male is forced, character-creation-screen-style, to choose one overtly consumptive hobby that in some small part defines their tw [...]

Hidden settings are for cowards 🔗

At Stripe, we had two abstractions for branching logic in production: flags, which were meant to be explicitly temporal (temporarily split-testing tra [...]

Fathom 🔗

I'd been meaning to jot down some thoughts on Fathom for a while, and did not have a particularly good reason to do so until the news broke that Paul [...]

Klarna: nineteen years, twenty billion kroner 🔗

I tend to ignore the entire genre of what we now refer to as BNPL businesses — Affirm, Afterpay (RIP), Klarna, et al — not for any particular sin I fe [...]

A good H1 🔗

Buttondown was kindly featured in H1 Gallery last week, and Ryan asked me to opine a bit on how we arrived at our current iteration, which is the anod [...]

Shipping is capturing value 🔗

This great essay from Sean Goedecke went viral two weeks ago, drawing fury and fervor alike for a Moral Mazes-esque analysis of how engineers at large [...]

Applied Cartography × Val Town 🔗

Had a blast live-coding some experimentations with Steve and Shovel yesterday using Val Town. (If you haven't used Val, well, watch the stream — think [...]

VC does not guarantee PMF 🔗

Two companies that I started following (with no small amount of envy) back in 2021: Hype (fka Pico) sold to an MMA-themed holdco earlier this year. Ra [...]

October, 2024 🔗

Hello! Lots of writing in October (what early parenthood takes away in terms of deep flow, it gives back in terms of twenty-minute pockets of time and [...]

Bozos 🔗

Kevin Twohy has a list of heuristics for new projects/clients, and my favorite is simple: No Bozos. Simple policy. No exceptions. You know it when you [...]

Meta's two assets 🔗

(Epistemic disclaimer: there are few Extremely Big Tech Companies to whom I feel apathy more vividly than Meta. I had a Facebook account in high schoo [...]

Projects are things with steps 🔗

Lots of kind words poured in as a response to My approach to GTD and PKM, and one question was asked so frequently that I decided to write about it. W [...]

Notebook as marketing primitive 🔗

Earlier this week, I stumbled upon this brilliant marketing-slash-documentation idea from SingleStore — notebooks as a first-party page! There are a h [...]

My approach to GTD and PKM 🔗

One pernicious thing with writing about productivity and knowledge systems: you only change systems that aren’t working, and you tend to write about t [...]

Consider the data product 🔗

The advice might seem dated these days, but I think the stair step approach to bootstrapping is evergreen: It’s much easier to sell an add-on to an ex [...]

You should build this: 🔗

A prior iteration of this site had a page called "Project ideas" that listed a bunch of things that I'd like to build. This was a good idea and useful [...]

Migrating to Django 5 🔗

The total LOC delta to migrate Buttondown from Django 4 to Django 5 was +143, -150. (I was incentivized to do so because our search right now is quite [...]

Applied Cartography × People & Blogs 🔗

There are few pleasures greater than getting to be profiled for an interview series that you've been reading for months, and last week I got to do exa [...]

Talking to customers 🔗

You say that these numbers mean dial it down. I say they mean dial it up. You haven't gotten through. There are people you haven't persuaded yet. Thes [...]

Notes on Zed, revisited 🔗

A little over six months ago, I wrote Notes on Zed. My conclusion at that time was that Zed made a lot of great choices and felt really good to use, b [...]

Two weeks of parenthood 🔗

We've had Lucy for two weeks, which qualifies us as experts, which means it is time to write about parenthood. (In all seriousness, consider the below [...]

Applied Cartography × Indie Rails 🔗

Chatted with Jess and Jeremy about a whole slew of things, from pricing strategy to terrifying and arcane differences between various Markdown parsers [...]

Always use an enum for your status field 🔗

When I was first starting my career at Amazon — even more bright-eyed and rosy-cheeked than I am now — I was thrilled by the concept of an "architectu [...]

Why your marketing site should be separate 🔗

In Notes on buttondown.com and How Buttondown uses HAProxy, I outlined the slightly kludgy way we serve buttondown.com both as a marketing site (publi [...]

MD5-based uniqueness constraints in Django 🔗

Yesterday, I was trying to set a unique constraint for comments in Buttondown to prevent accidental double-commenting, and I ran into a problem that I [...]

Notes on 'Founder Mode' / Lieutenancy 🔗

In Paul Graham’s latest essay, he writes: The theme of Brian's talk was that the conventional wisdom about how to run larger companies is mistaken. As [...]

Keeping a technical edge 🔗

Someone emailed me in response to Two years as an independent technologist, in which I wrote: I miss of being at a large company, which is dealing wit [...]

How Buttondown uses HAProxy 🔗

There are few technical decisions I regret more with Buttondown than the decision to combine the author-facing app, the subscriber-facing app, and the [...]

Notes on buttondown.com 🔗

We spent $85,000 for buttondown.com in April; this was the biggest capital expenditure I've ever made, and though it was coming from cash flow generat [...]

Using Cursor to port Django tests to pytest 🔗

When it comes to AI tooling, I am equal parts optimist and cynic. I have no moral qualm with using these tools (Supermaven is a pretty heavy part of m [...]

Improving Django's default pagination performance 🔗

Buttondown's API calls are very fast, and one of the reasons why is that we've removed every single possible database query that we can. The most rece [...]

Peak Newsletter 🔗

A handful of folks sent me this quip from Nate Silver a few days ago: Slightly against interest to admit this (I don't want more competition lol) but [...]

Incumbency 🔗

Andrew Rea with an interesting and increasingly familiar take about how AI will disrupt software-focused private equity: Distribution and brand moats [...]

Content debt 🔗

There’s a nascent trend of releasing ostensibly-private material (changelogs, public wikis, handbooks, etc.) to the public as a bit of a marketing pus [...]

Against Against Innovation Tokens 🔗

Glyph (whose writing and contributions to the Python ecosystem I am deeply grateful for) wrote Against Innovation Tokens yesterday: In 2015, Dan McKin [...]

Pytest: test for print statements 🔗

Inspired by Adam Johnson's test for pending migrations, and of course in conversation with my own love of weird tests, I offer a similar concept: a te [...]

Typesafe routes in Vue 🔗

I watched Gary Bernhardt's talk on static routing back a few years ago and — I'm not sure if I would call it formative, but it stuck in my craw as a p [...]

Notes from May 🔗

Lots of writing this month: Why you should use Rails A reminder that things take time How shadcn/ui's previews work Why I hate that 1.01% meme A lovel [...]

The taste of beer 🔗

Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity. There’s a relatively famous line from Bezos, circulated first a [...]

Why can't you just...? 🔗

Buried in a snarky thread about why Google Calendar doesn’t support calendar syncing is a long, detailed explanation of why shipping this sort of thin [...]

Git one-liner: get the earliest commit from X hours ago 🔗

I wanted to get a commit that was temporally some distance back as part of my experimentation with git cliff. This took some time to do, but here's wh [...]

Notes on ActivityPub 🔗

By far the single most-fruitful tactic has been "just look at raw GET responses from Mastodon and see what things are shaped like." I know that "Activ [...]

Auth.js + Square 🔗

Internal tools and small, well-scoped projects are a great avenue to tinker with technologies on the periphery of your understanding, and a Third Sout [...]

Au revoir, Invoke 🔗

It's not quite interesting or noteworthy enough to warrant a full-on essay, but yesterday we unshipped the last remaining Invoke commands and ported t [...]

Grace notes 🔗

I'm not loving Unreasonable Hospitality, but it did supply me with a phrase that I've been looking for: Eventually, that gesture became one of our ste [...]

44% 🔗

If you spend enough time digesting hackneyed business or self-improvement advice, you've probably seen someone wax poetic about the following image: [...]

How shadcn/ui examples work 🔗

I’m increasingly convinced that for developer-first tools, a really good docs experience is a durable, non-trivial advantage. Part of this thesis is t [...]

Things take time 🔗

Things take time. Nintendo fairly famously was born in 1889, and the modern incarnation — Yamamuchi Nintendo & Co., LTD — was established nearly fifty [...]

Use Rails 🔗

I have a good number of people ask me what software stack they should use. I always have a two-part answer: Use what you're familiar with. If there's [...]

Notes from April 🔗

Welcome to spring, bona fide and humid. Lots of writing this month: I wrote about spending the past two years as an independent technologist. On the m [...]

Finding null JSON values in Postgres 🔗

Postgres' JSONB functionality is fast and useful but when I find myself dropping down from the Django ORM into SQL to do weird things, the syntax stri [...]

You need to be frictionlog-maxxing 🔗

Lots of people have spent the past few days discussing the perceived increase in difficulty in getting an entry-level programming job relative to the [...]

You gotta be able to taste the kool-aid 🔗

Cognition, a six-month-old startup in the AI coding space just raised $175m at a $2b valuation: Despite the skepticism surrounding Devin’s launch, the [...]

Stripe Sessions 2024 🔗

Stripe held the keynote for Sessions, their annual WWDC/re:invent-esque conference, this morning. I wanted to jot down some thoughts while they’re sti [...]

Weird test: internal link checking 🔗

I wrote last month about using weird tests. Here's another example: checking for broken internal links in our upcoming docsite redesign! const extract [...]

Tailwind black magic: swallowing all pointer events 🔗

I wrote two days ago about a real and useful application of Tailwind black magic; here's another. Buttondown has a dropzone component lets folks drag- [...]

Tailwind black magic: styling paragraphs within tables 🔗

The new version of the Buttondown docs site is all in on Keystatic, Markdoc, and Tailwind's typography plugin — which makes it really easy to author b [...]

Why should a company? 🔗

For a long time, my goal with Buttondown was largely around failure avoidance: "I want to get my first paying customer so I know it's not a fake produ [...]

Are monopolies bad, actually? 🔗

One of the more interesting theses advanced by Zero to One [1] is that monopolies are good to the extent that they afford companies the agency and com [...]

Is cool enough? 🔗

Via HN I ran into not one but two extremely neat and pleasant-looking libraries for URL manipulation. They look like great libraries, and a prior vers [...]

PSA: mess around with Keystatic 🔗

We've been using Keystatic in Buttondown for around six months now: we migrated most of the content on the marketing site (which is backed by Next) fr [...]

Globals in Histoire 🔗

Histoire, like so many other tools in the Vue ecosystem, is a bit of a neglected younger sibling to Storybook — a little bit uglier, with worse docume [...]

Notes on Zed 🔗

I was late to the VS Code zeitgeist, and as penitence I try to go out of my way to try new editors whenever I see them — which is why this morning I i [...]

PSA: mess around with Kolo 🔗

I had bookmarked Kolo many months ago to try out and finally got a chance to integrate it with Buttondown — a process that I expected to take a couple [...]

Vibes and years 🔗

XH asks: How do indie developers/small teams keep track of and prioritize long-term roadmaps? I've been basically work off my gut + Feeling of the Day [...]

You should use Helpscout 🔗

Was digging through old issues of the personal site and found this draft snippet: I was evaluating HelpScout as a potential first step in a series of [...]

11ty 🔗

.njk as the default templating language is an odd choice, and I find myself stubbing my toe on it a good amount. Maybe that's a me thing! It is extrem [...]

Buttondown Analytics 3.0 🔗

Working on a new analytics engine — a scant eleven months after the previous 'new analytics engine'. Calling this 3.0 is a bit of a misnomer: most of [...]

Gosling’s Old Rum 🔗

Virginia has draconian liquor laws, which means I have to get interesting bottles shipped from [REDACTED], a site on which I am very prone to judging [...]

Applied Cartography