Vanya on 42nd Street 🔗
This is, as far as I can tell, the first movie I've ever watched on the strength of an algorithmic recommendation — and the fact that it is now one of [...]
Applied Cartography
Posts
Software never had a soul 🔗
Ryo Lu recently wrote: [...]
March, 2026 🔗
The chaos is finally — but not totally — starting to fade. In early March we moved back into our house, replete with new floors and a sense of somethi [...]
A month of OpEx quick wins 🔗
I spent the past few weeks chasing quick OpEx wins for sport, having felt a nagging sensation that the orchards of our org were a little too-laden wit [...]
Why I'm a film blogger now 🔗
I have written more words about film in 2026 than I have about technology and business. This has not escaped your attention — so much so that real-lif [...]
Mistress America 🔗
I'm sorry, I know you liked Brooke. He told me that she worships you, she kept talking about how smart you are, how interesting... [...]
Stop Making Sense 🔗
A polite man is driven to murder. He becomes a prophet and screams manifestos on love, war, and the increasingly alarming impact of technology and pro [...]
What I would be doing 🔗
Tanvir asked me a few days ago what I would build today if Buttondown didn't exist and I was still keen, fully employed elsewhere. This is a fertile q [...]
Archiving the roadmap 🔗
Pour one out for Buttondown's transparent roadmap, which I formally archived yesterday evening after a year or so of informal archival. This felt like [...]
21 Bridges 🔗
A derivative, predictable, competent crime thriller. If you read that sentence and think "good," then you will like this film, and the opposite is tru [...]
Paterson 🔗
Paterson is a film about art being a sinew in our life. Paterson has three distinct selves that we witness in the film — husband, laborer, regular at [...]
How Buttondown's API versioning works 🔗
How Buttondown's API versioning works. [...]
Self-hosting our GitHub Action runners 🔗
Buttondown's CI runs on Blacksmith, which is a great service that I am still happy to pay for (see also this note). [...]
Past Lives 🔗
I am legitimately struggling to articulate why Past Lives did not quite resonate with me the way it did with so many others. I found it beautiful with [...]
The road to Pydantic V2 🔗
Around 18 months ago, I wrote: [...]
Singles 🔗
I learned of this band, as many people did, through the Letterman performance. And it is as stunning as the internet commentary leads you to believe. [...]
Ascensions 🔗
Most procedurally generated roguelikes have a concept of ascending difficulty levels designed to test the mettle of players who have wasted the most t [...]
February, 2026 🔗
Last month's Wednesday update, I recorded from a train headed to Middelburg. This month I write closer to home temporally and otherwise. I am en route [...]
Unshipping Keystatic 🔗
Two years after initially adopting it, we've formally unshipped Keystatic. Our CMS, such as it is, is now a bunch of Markdoc files and a TypeScript sc [...]
How we check every link in your email 🔗
How Buttondown checks every link in your email. [...]
Somewhere 🔗
Somewhere is a film that on the surface level feels and sounds like a complete retread. The log line is as cliché as it gets: a famous but unhappy act [...]
Scattered thoughts on LLM tools 🔗
ChatGPT 5 is an incrementally better, higher-quality experience than its predecessors, and it lets you use an LLM in many different ways. But as a pie [...]
What Happened Was 🔗
Two of my absolute favorite films of all time, albeit for very different reasons, are My Dinner with Andre and Before Sunrise. Both of these films, wh [...]
Golinks 🔗
If you've never encountered golinks before: they're short, memorable URLs that redirect to longer ones. Instead of telling a coworker "the dashboard i [...]
Improper nouns 🔗
Myles wrote a great post about standing up and scaling our nascent recommendation engine. Buried in the middle is an aside which, as you might suspect [...]
Perfection 🔗
They did for money now what they used to do out of passion. This was a fact. From this fact they concluded that they had turned their passion into a j [...]
Changelog mornings 🔗
A new addition to my routine has been to start every morning writing out our changelog from the day before. This is mildly surprising to people who as [...]
More weird tests 🔗
It has been a while since I wrote about weird tests. This is not due to lack of enthusiasm — if anything, I think my passion for them has redoubled ov [...]
Maybe use Plain 🔗
When I wrote about Help Scout, much of my praise was appositional. They were the one tool I saw that did not aggressively shoehorn you into using them [...]
On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) 🔗
I was ready to wash my hands of this book very early on. I've seen enough vaguely auteurist time loop art like Palm Springs or Russian Doll to conside [...]
The Family Fang 🔗
You might not believe it, but I studied at my university. I studied in the experimental theater wing. So your parents are just two of the most importa [...]
Subpaths vs. subdomains 🔗
If you want to have user-level namespaces on a single domain — such as company.com/justin — you have two options: namespacing via subpath (company.com [...]
Outgrowing Django admin 🔗
For a bit of dessert work this week, I'm working on a full-fledged attempt at replacing the majority of our stock Django admin usage with something pu [...]
Notes on "Harness Engineering" 🔗
I find it useful and revealing to perform very close readings of engineering blog posts from frontier labs. They seem like meaningful artifacts that, [...]
Heaven or Las Vegas 🔗
I'm not sure how to politely accuse the entire genre of dreampop of having ripped off this album in particular. It is perhaps the recency bias. I thin [...]
The Rip 🔗
The Rip is a deeply simulacric movie, not just in the Netflix action thriller sense, but also in the sense of it largely existing in the context of al [...]
The death of software, the A24 of software 🔗
Steven Sinofsky recently published Death of Software. Nah., arguing via historical case studies that AI will not kill software any more than previous [...]
Better tests 🔗
What makes for a good test? I feel like there is a dearth of useful literature on this subject, perhaps because a lot of the content which ostensibly [...]
Notes on "How I'd Grow Buttondown" 🔗
A friend sent me Andrea Bosoni's How I'd grow Buttondown, a great and thoughtful piece. It's fun to read someone else do the exact intellectual exerci [...]
One status field per model 🔗
Any sufficiently old application starts to succumb to a pernicious form of technical debt known in street parlance as shitty data modeling. [...]
RIP XSLT 🔗
If you visit feed.xml in your browser, you will see that I have done the Cool Kid thing and added styling to it via XSLT. This was originally somethin [...]
Building a data greenhouse 🔗
A conviction I've held for a while now — one that has upgraded from idiosyncratic to prescient — is that you should insource your data warehouse. Pull [...]
Rope 🔗
There must be something about wintertime because almost exactly one year ago I finally watched North by Northwest, a film that is unsurprisingly terri [...]
In praise of actions 🔗
When I first encountered all of the concepts that I'll describe as controllers or actions or services, I would try to adhere to them with the logic of [...]
The Double 🔗
A person can get really sick by just floating by. [...]
January, 2026 🔗
This is not, if I'm being honest, the simple, structured start to 2026 that I had in mind. Rigor and early workouts have been replaced by pulled floor [...]
Maturing your support function past a single engineer 🔗
It feels a little odd to be writing about scaling support as if from a position of authority. But I had two recent conversations around the same topic [...]
LLM as advance team 🔗
My first foray into using git worktree-style development — spinning up multiple workspaces and having LLM agents attack different problems in parallel [...]
Brief notes on migrating to Postgres-backed jobs 🔗
It seems premature to talk about a migration that is only halfway done, even if it's the hard half that's done — but I think there's something useful [...]