The new look 🔗
As you may have noticed, the site has a new look. I don't think of it as a new version of the site, in no small part because the structure has not cha [...]
Applied Cartography
Posts
Vue 🔗
The most common follow-up question I got about the post I wrote on Django last month had nothing to do with Django at all. It was about a comment I to [...]
State and Main 🔗
Go, you Huskies! [...]
To Live and Die in L.A. 🔗
To Live and Die in L.A. is a movie I find remarkable in its ability to drown you with positive and negative qualities — so many of each, and so evenly [...]
The Pale King 🔗
I came to The Pale King with the same skepticism I brought to Infinite Jest — for different reasons. With Infinite Jest, it was that book's thick popu [...]
Engineering produces wisdom 🔗
A software organization can generate competitive advantage in many ways: network effects, branding/counter-positioning, switching costs, etc. [...]
Slack workflows as duct tape 🔗
A workflow we've wanted for a long time at Buttondown: throw a random paper cut or complaint into a Slack channel, and get a nicely formatted Linear i [...]
Flirting with Disaster 🔗
An odd little bird of a movie — one that, in retrospect, kicked off a fairly solid career for David O. Russell, and one littered with great performanc [...]
Talk Easy 🔗
A running joke between me and a few friends is the inevitability of all podcasts — or really, all interview mediums — to curdle into anodyne pablum as [...]
It's just a model 🔗
I, like many people, have witnessed and felt the whiplash between the seemingly-orgastic highs of the Astra launch and the experience of using the mod [...]
Hiring and firing a DBA 🔗
For the past sixty days, Buttondown 1I take liberties here and throughout the essay: this was all Matias' doing. He also wrote a great piece on our mi [...]
/shuffle 🔗
I'm here to tell you about a hidden feature of sorts that I built for Buttondown. Go to buttondown.com/shuffle and you will be served a completely ran [...]
Coffee and Cigarettes 🔗
The relative scarcity of anthology films contributes to an unease with their lack of narrative cohesion in much the same way someone reading a collect [...]
Conjury 🔗
A difficulty I have when reviewing Slay the Spire-likes is a certain anchoring bias. It can feel unfair to judge an otherwise good game, even partiall [...]
Soulstone Survivors 🔗
M&Ms tend to trigger in me a kind of existential crisis if I have more than a few. A small handful is no problem, but any more than that and I abruptl [...]
Fable 5.1 🔗
Anthropic released Fable 5.1 this week. My initial reaction to the release was this comment I made in the Third South Slack: [...]
Everybody Wants Some!! 🔗
The single most pleasurable movie of all time is Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven, and it achieves that status in order to try to convey what makes filmmak [...]
BB, Grok Bot 🔗
Another month, another field report from testing some vaguely interesting tools: this time, BB and Grok Bot. [...]
EPUB is not that scary 🔗
In a prior life, I worked on Kindle — specifically on content pipelines and data processing. This either excuses the fact that I had no real idea what [...]
The Man Who Knew Too Much 🔗
The Man Who Knew Too Much is a film of peaks and valleys. There is little argument that it is a good film; whether you place it amongst the highest of [...]
Wet Hot American Summer 🔗
It feels like a long-standing embarrassment that I had never seen Wet Hot American Summer. And the longer I put it off, the harder it became to watch [...]
Notes on Cloudflare Access 🔗
Cloudflare is now in the AWS zone: it has a long tail of useful but under-examined little services that haven't quite entered the zeitgeist the way th [...]
A Master Builder 🔗
Vanya on 42nd Street is, to date, my favorite film of the year. The more I revisit it, the more I suspect it might be one of my favorites of all time. [...]
Tech debt is weird 🔗
Jesse wrote this interesting article on technical debt, which resonated with me spiritually but not directionally -- which is a very weird way to say [...]
Secondhand Time 🔗
It is rare that I review a book before I finish it. Sometimes I do this with bad books that I have not completed — but that is what the Goodreads user [...]
MacGruber 🔗
Letterboxd has an ingenious concept baked into its rating system. You can rate a film on a scale of zero to four stars, and you can also adorn a film [...]
Patch notes 🔗
Earlier this year I mentioned that Slay the Spire 2 had reached the status of needing to be deleted from my computer, on the grounds that it was provi [...]
Adaptation 🔗
Eighteen months ago, I wrote in review of Being John Malkovich: [...]
Near to the Wild Heart 🔗
Two friends, upon learning that I wanted to get into Clarice Lispector, advised me not to start with Near to the Wild Heart. Having now finished the b [...]
op, mprocs 🔗
Two small tooling changes that have been really nice for us at Buttondown: [...]
Best of Enemies 🔗
Last year, I watched The War Room, the documentary following Bill Clinton's first campaign — a film I am remiss for having never written about, becaus [...]
Snacks are cheaper and tastier than ever 🔗
Perhaps the single most consequential essay I've read is Will Larson's Work on what matters. This is ostensibly advice targeted towards staff engineer [...]
Cursed knowledge 🔗
Nick pointed me towards Marcin who pointed me towards immich's list of cursed knowledge the other day, and it has already become a running joke in the [...]
Enough Said 🔗
More by luck than by fate, most of the great protagonists of the last forty years of television have escaped forever being associated with the charact [...]
Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie 🔗
No matter what, you're going to have a great time watching this movie. It is funny and audacious and handcrafted, which is a quality that feels increa [...]
Check the status page 🔗
As I've covered somewhat extensively in prior writing (see A month of OpEx quick wins and Self-hosting our GitHub Action runners), this year has been [...]
How the media library works 🔗
I've received a number of questions as to how the media library part of this blog works, and I figure it's worth a bit of time to explain — even thoug [...]
Wings of Desire 🔗
When I try to describe this film, I keep fleeing from the word strange toward poetic — because there isn't much strange about it. If you accept its co [...]
Notorious 🔗
I think this might be the first Hitchcock that just didn't really work for me. The premise feels unlike so much of his output: dated and strained. [...]
Two hundred decisions 🔗
This week, after a little under two years of having adopted the practice, Buttondown has minted its 200th decision log. This is a practice very simila [...]
June, 2026 🔗
June, like any month in which I neither write very much nor read very much, feels already cryptographic in retrospect. [...]
Jay Kelly 🔗
I was young. I wanted something very badly and I was afraid that if I took my eye off it, I wouldn’t have it. And I was right. There was no other way [...]
Denormalization 101 🔗
I have had exactly two conversations this week about denormalization, which is a sign that it is time to write a blog post. If you already know what d [...]
Peggy Sue Got Married 🔗
I envy you. You have your whole life ahead of you and you know exactly what you want to do. But forget the rat puke; write something beautiful. [...]
Indeterminate / Squash 🔗
The hardest part of gardening is not correctly timing the seedling transfer, or deciding when a plant is a goner versus when it just needs one more we [...]
The Man from Earth 🔗
One interesting thing about films, relative to — say — writing within video games, is the demarcation of amateurishness. (A description I don't mean t [...]
Victory is a lossy compressor 🔗
Update, July 2026: Bill Mill kindly pointed out that the Cavs' head coach is Kenny Atkinson, not JB Bickerstaff — who coached Cleveland until 2024 but [...]
Back to Overcast 🔗
In what is certainly the least consequential update in this blog's history: I have boomeranged back from Apple Podcasts to Overcast. [...]