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 [...]
Applied Cartography
Posts
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 [...]
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 [...]
The Hudsucker Proxy 🔗
When does an indulgence become sour? I ask this because indulgence is the word that most immediately comes to mind at the finish of this film. And lar [...]
Recent forays into developer productivity 🔗
I've written before about my posture around LLMs being mostly summarizable as design your systems and abstractions to accommodate an infinite number o [...]
The Killer 🔗
Read review: The Killer [...]
A Shadow Intelligence 🔗
I don't know where to begin with this. I feel like I have less of a through line of analysis and more an assemblage of unordered reactions and observa [...]
Ocean's Twelve 🔗
This might not be the perfect time or whatever to talk about it but I've been doing my homework and I'd really like to play a more central role this t [...]
The Pigeon Tunnel 🔗
Read review: The Pigeon Tunnel [...]
Every model should have a notes field 🔗
Production data, like real life, is messy. Your database — or at least the projection of the world as expressed by your database — will become riddled [...]
Pure strategy 🔗
The goal of a build tool is to take a bunch of disparate inputs and compile them into an output: [...]
Refactoring a product is tricky 🔗
It's easy to talk about refactoring at the codebase level because there's a reflexive definition: a refactor is a change to the codebase that preserve [...]
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) 🔗
There is much to love about this film. The aesthetic, production design, and cast are unquestionably immaculate. There is a clear sense of place and c [...]
Migrating to PlanetScale 🔗
First off, huge amount of credit to Mati for migrating our database to PlanetScale. I highly recommend reading the blog post. He does a good job talki [...]
Uses (January 2026) 🔗
A few updates to my Uses page: [...]
Obsidian for internal docs 🔗
I've grown cautious of my proclivity to prematurely review a tool. The most important quality of any tool meant to be used regularly is the ease with [...]
Terragon, Conductor, PyCharm 🔗
I was sad and unsurprised to get an email from Terragon announcing that they were sunsetting the product. [...]
Levels of the Game 🔗
It seems fortuitous that my McPhee reading spree coincided with having watched Challengers. Like Challengers did sixty years after the fact, Levels of [...]
Their values are stronger than yours 🔗
Phil Adams on Buttondown's approach to company values. [...]
The Diplomat (Season 2) 🔗
If you're representing the interests of 300 million Americans whose healthcare is failing, whose planet is burning, whose future mighty get a little b [...]