Some of my Summer reading …

These are some of the essays I read in May 2021.

These are some of the essays I read in April 2021.

What makes an idea good?

A few highlights of what I read in March.

I like to work the fridge down until it’s almost empty, to both win the fridge, and to make it easier to clean. Today I wanted some relish, but don’t normally stock it in the winter as I use it so rarely. So instead I made some: ½ cup of chopped, sweet pickles ½ cup […]

I’ve been using Pico-8 as a virtual playground for playing with generative art ideas. Pico-8 is a highly constrained virtual machine that behaves a lot like a personal computer from the 1980s. It has a fixed colour palette, limited memory, limited screen size, and a simplified programming model using Lua. The constraints make it a […]

This is a hacky fridge-magnet recipe to use up some old herbs and sour cream. We had it this week tossed with a chunky combination of sliced cabbage, cherry tomatoes, and diced broccoli, carrots, and celery. 2 tbsp Hellmann’s mayo 2 tbsp sour cream ~2 tbsp (to taste) cider vinegar (Braggs is good) 2 tbsp […]

These are some of the things I read in February, the longer, more interesting essays and posts at least.

Today’s dinner is inspired by a picture in my morning news feed. I’ll have to try that sweet potato curry recipe at some point, but today I’m working with ingredients I have on hand, which includes lemongrass, pork sirloin tip, and a boatload of veg. Pork and mushrooms 500-750g of pork sirloin, thinly sliced and […]

Today we were craving stir fry so I decided to practice the basic method two ways: lemongrass pork and sweet ginger/garlic pork. We had a sirloin tip roast on hand, which is best cooked using a fast method as it’s lean and tender. This method doesn’t include deep frying the pork, so is much lighter […]

I set up a new dev laptop for myself over the Christmas holidays. I took the opportunity to burn down my old environment and to survey the 2021 tool landscape, which included testing out various terminals and setups, editors, and fonts. This year I discovered Fira Code, a tidy little monospace font that supports ligatures. […]

I love food. I love the eating of, shopping for, designing menus around, and above all else, preparation of meals (especially for those closest to me). Cookery is a universe of systemizing making food, to me at least, and is not unlike software design and development.

I picked up a pair of Sennheiser PXC 550-II Wireless headphones last month to add to my collection of pandemic listening (and Zoom call) devices. These replace my old Sennheiser HD280PRO over-ear studio style headphones, which my youngest borrowed for their pandemic university and D&D setup. Given a 20+ hour battery life, good comfort and […]

These are some of the things I read in January, the longer, more interesting essays and posts at least.

These are some of the longer form things I’ve read this year. I shove links into Instapaper and dump them here with some hacked command line tools and a bit of elbow grease. SuperRT The Anti-Mac User Interface (Don Gentner and Jakob Nielsen) Cameras and Lenses – Bartosz Ciechanowski A Second Conversation with Werner Vogels […]

This is a super lazy no-knead dough. It’s lazy in that you really only have to measure water, salt, and yeast, and then just add flour until it feels right. And even if it’s too dry or too wet, you can get a pretty good pizza out of it. This is a great dough to practice with, as it encourages you to think about how the dough looks and feels while you’re putting it together.

Did I mention that it’s a super lazy dough?

This is a very approximate version of my pizza sauce. I make it different each time, though the pattern is tending towards what I outline here.

When my sketchbook is stale and I’m not feeling inspired, I look to pop culture for inspiration and ideas. I’m also a fan of other artists, and channeling some of their works through my own hands is immensely satisfying. It’s an exercise that pushes you to analyze and rethink a thing that’s interesting to me, […]

I was looking at buying a set of PFEIL carving tools this year, but was holding off as they’re pretty pricy. I expanded my search a bit and found a similar set from a local Canadian company, Lee Valley Tools. They’re hardened steel with a comfortable wooden handle. They sharpen easily (and keep their edge […]

One of my favourite reads is Kottke.org, a blog by Jason Kottke. Calling it a blog is a bit of a slight: it’s more of a magazine, like a proto-New Yorker. It’s thoughtful and relevant, weaving current events, artsy things, various interesting edges of tech, and topics about general humanity. Kottke has been killing it […]

A coworker was asking me what I used for linocut, so I made a chart of the blocks on my desk. There are several types of blocks that I don’t have in my supplies (like mounted block and clear blocks), but the ones I use are a pretty common set of hobbyist materials. I love […]

Occasionally I like to sketch and carve things around our lemony brand. It’s fun to think sideways around our polished brand marks, dreaming in colour and texture. These prints don’t represent anything we would ever use, but the exercise was a good stretch for me (and good practice). This is a second print of the […]

2017 was a good year for JavaScript. The newer language features are now part of our daily routine. Tightly integrated CI and packaging scripts are the norm, and we have a huge sea of libraries and tools available to us. The core JavaScript frameworks have settled down and mature to the point that we can be confident in JS as the base for large-scale commercial projects.

Some of my most productive business tools are the simplest. Take the *triage board*. It’s a whiteboard that hangs over my desk that has a list of my current projects, with magnets marking what I’m working on next. Weekly I erase the board and re-prioritize my projects, and daily I scribble notes and move the magnets as I work. 

I’m an idea guy. It’s why I love designing software, both in terms of system design and user experience. I love designing and developing products too. It’s something that can get me fired up, keep me from sleeping, and keep me motivated through even the darkest, rainiest days.

In PM land we use tools and techniques like burn down charts, sprints, and spikes. You can get obsessed over getting these things right, and fail to ship effective, quality software. The special language used in and around these processes adds to the problem too, as the language ends up feeling like an accomplishment in itself. Too much focus on the pomp and circumstance of a process takes away from actually building great software.

I made a quick print this weekend based on a few drawings I was working on last week. The idea was to make a block print look like a sketch, and to use background lines as a textural element.

Sometime over the last year I stopped paying attention to Twitter. Between the political cacophony of 2016 and a growing list of people I was following, the noise ratio was just too poor to hold my interest. Twitter had become like LinkedIn to me, a service I used to have a professional presence, but not one that inspired or taught me anything. I had given up.

There’s a lot to like about our beloved task management tools. But if we’re honest, there’s a lot they get wrong too. Here are a few ways TODO tools grind my gears: Every task and list looks exactly the same. Lists are organized with limited hierarchy and pre-requisites. Lists are organized with no real spacial […]

It’s easy to feel unqualified to measure technical decisions, especially if you’re not technical. You may be disconnected from the planning process or you may not understand the jargon and details of an approach. How can you ask intelligent questions about risk when you feel so separated from what’s happening? How can you make clear decisions about risks with incomplete technical knowledge?

At best, we treat software technical debt like consumer debt, where we blissfully ignore the commodity and the terms of our choices, focusing only on our immediate need. At worst, we label our poor technical decisions debt (especially our predecessor’s). It’s a lazy phrase, a cop-out, and is a costly way of doing business.

Now this is where it gets interesting. I’ve been interviewing and hiring for almost 20 years. I have accumulated a bunch of questions I ask people. And while the technologies I talk about have changed, I have always expected certain skills and behaviours from specific levels of software developers. In terms of soft skills this has been very successful, but recently I’ve noticed that the hard skills have dissipated.

The New Year came and went without much of a fuss. I read about the [2016 Maker Challenge][1] shortly after the holiday, in the flood of annual self-help and 2016 resolution articles. The challenge was something I was keenly interested in, then promptly forgot about in the chaos of startup and family life.

I’m not old yet, but I’m becoming a curmudgeon. In fact, I love the word *curmudgeon*, it’s a word that sounds like its meaning, with a spelling that is all pissy and annoyed. It’s a word of [mystery][1], and we know very little about its origin. It’s an interesting word, and interesting is good.

I have tried to love podcasts for a few years now. There are several that I like, but I find it difficult to listen to any of them consistently. I’ll binge listen for a few weeks, but for whatever reason I get stuck and move on to the next show.

We tried something new on art day recently: printing with Lego. It has potential, even if it’s a bit of a pain to clean up.

I think about software design by diagramming and writing. The act itself improves the result. It forces me to decompose and organize the problem, and attempt to explain it back to myself. I have always been able to think about software through this process of sketching, refining, and describing diagrams, even when I didn’t know anything about what was standard or what should be done. I started by doing what made sense to me.

A friend asked me what my design philosophy was and how it had changed over the years. He was asking about the design and flow of applications and websites. Actually, he actually asked about visual design specifically, which I found interesting in itself. I paused for a moment when he asked, which is unusual for me as […]

As designers, software developers, and business geeks we thrive on a few things. We seek inspiration. We obsess over details. We work long hours. And we need *focus*.

As a software designer, I love to design software. As software developer, I love building software. When I dream of better things, I funnel my ideas into new projects. When I don’t have time for all of my side projects, the projects pile up in a corner and gather dust. And when a side project is an unfinished publishing platform it gets in the way of writing.

I learned almost nothing about writing production code in my early years. And while discovered that I loved to imagine and build things in code, I barely brushed against the principles that would later be required to make real learning possible. My skills didn’t improve much either as my time was largely unfocused.

I review a lot of code these days. It’s an incredible way to nudge a team of bright people toward greatness. It allows me to look at problems from the outside with a perspective of experience and distance from the low level design. The perspective is important too, and I see things that I often miss in my own code. You see, we’re easily blinded when we’re too close to the problems we’re trying to solve.

Sending a client data is trivial in most dynamic languages, and PHP is no different. You return a response body with the result of a `json_encode` and your data model.

PHP is a great language. It follows a long lineage of C-based syntaxes, mirroring much of the C standard library. It performs well, is trivial to deploy, and has been stable for many years. And, it’s almost universally hated. While many people look down on PHP, it’s worth considering where it shines compared to other […]

A developer asked me a seemingly obvious question today: I have an API GET request that requires a JSON body. Is that okay? It’s a good question too. It turns out the answer isn’t as simple as it should be. On principle the answer is, “No, it’s not cool”. A GET is an idempotent request […]

I’ve been busy working on visual design bits for work projects this summer. My method is simple: Sketches and storyboards Static mockups (HTML/CSS, some Javascript) Live mockups (to test integration and interactions) Uncovering what a feature means is fundamental to the method. It exposes the nouns and verbs of the problem, and hints at the […]

Friction works against you. It exceeds your ability to progress. It deflates you, stripping your motivation. It’s the hill you see before starting a difficult project. It’s the gravity that pulls you away when interest wanes. I’m starting a small project for a client today. It’s a simple set of improvements to something I built […]

One of my favourite JavaScript features is its literal object notation. It allows you to declare data structures in JSON, which is a very succinct, C-like syntax. You can use this notation to declare SETs, and the a in b syntax to verify a variable is in a set: /* Declare your set as a […]

I have a suggestion. Do just one more thing. If it’s not rude, do another. And another.

Somehow I missed the recent larger EC2 unit sizes: When I saw this, I immediately thought: these numbers will have K, M, and G suffixes within the next 5 years. Compute units will be sold as 88 mega-ECUs. Imagine 88 giga-ECUs? The ECU is similar to our old measure of computing: boxen (except more virtual). […]

While writing a spec earlier today the last few years of progress in server land hit me: uptime is a facade. In the early days, server resources were expensive and scarce. Uptime was sacred. Long running hardware was celebrated, UNIX tools were born, beer was consumed. The problem of focusing on the hardware is that […]

I had an epiphany early this year: getting good at something isn’t about finding a groove or being especially clever, it’s about honing a method of doing something. Or lots of methods, meticulously crafted, carefully practiced, and well executed over and over again. That’s it. The problem is in discovering the method. It’s harder than […]

It’s not that these tools and techniques are bad in themselves, but our use of each should be fit into a well tuned approach to building software. An entire project delivery should be tidy, professional, and complete. There are a few causes to the problem of organizational buildup. Our software is limited, our methods need […]

So you can’t write. You’re empty, tired, and unfocused. You’ve tried exercise, meditation, caffeine, binge sleeping, and a dozen other cures–but nothing comes out. And when you do happen to squeeze out a few paragraphs, you stall, spiralling further into your uninspired daze. You are burnt out. Writer’s block and burnout are the same problem: […]

I’ve become passionate about design. It’s a subtle craft that says something, things that can’t normally be said with words. It suggests things. It implores us to think in a particular way. It encourages us to go here or there. It is enough of a metaphor to be easily recognized, but not so much that […]

I know a few generations of developers. I find they tend toward different ways of thinking about software design, based on the languages and decomposition tools that were available at the time they formed their thinking. Their tendencies shift over time too, but often their imaginations are limited by whichever mode of thought they’re working […]

If you want to get better at something, do a lot of it. Throw yourself at practice and real chances to do it. When you want to become great at something, stick with it, obsess over it, and suck up all of the knowledge that surrounds it. And when you want to become truly incredible […]

Merlin Mann asks us why we’re waiting to be awesome, as he remembers Steve Job’s 2005 Stanford address. It’s a good question: why do we wait? There are all sorts of reasons, of course, but in the end my simple philosophy is: just fucking do it. Sometimes I have to say it to myself out […]

I’m a bit surprised that the argument over tables versus semantic layout is still floating around. It ignores the obvious: Any set of nodes can be rendered like a table Any table node can be rendered like a non-table node There is really no difference between a <div> and a <td>, except for the default […]

2010 has come and gone. I’ve shipped a few projects, each a number of times. I’ve registered dozens of domain names and dropped a few of the older ones. I’ve started (but not finished) a dozen spare time projects. I’ve had hundreds of new ideas, and a few of them were even interesting. I’ve learned […]

When you describe a design to a group of people, each person imagines something different. Depending on your story and the individuals, understanding may vary wildly. And if it differs enough, the result is chaotic–unpredictable and often negative. You need to fit how you show your ideas to different groups of people carefully, and notice […]

Boost’s Filesystem library is an incredible resource: it abstracts paths, directories, and stat results. It simplifies coding shell problems in C++, it’s portable, and is maintained by a large community of contributors. The one downside of Boost is that some of its newer libraries are poorly documented. ((Something I want to contribute to.)) Until I […]