Writing helps me think.

My first real computer was an Atari 600XL. I usually tell people it was an 800, so I don’t have to explain the difference between models. With the 600XL I got a whopping 16 KB of RAM, a Centipede cartridge, and a previous-generation Atari 410 tape drive. That tape drive was the bane of my childhood. It ate tapes, the sort of low-quality cassettes that a 10-year-old boy could afford, always purchased in 10-packs at Radio Shack. The most devastating loss was when the drive destroyed my last copy of a horizontal scroller I’d written, along with every sprite I’d drawn for it. From those experiences, I learned to save each program I wrote several times, on multiple tapes when I had spares. It was never enough. ...

Years ago, something clicked when I read about Anthony Bourdain’s approach to feeding crowds. It was his stunt turkey technique, where he cooks an extra turkey the week before the actual event. It made me think about how we release software. It seemed absurd at first: why would you cook two turkeys for one dinner? Then I realized what he was really doing: load balancing across time. ...

There’s a moment in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker that fundamentally changes how you see the game world. You’ve spent dozens of hours sailing between islands, comfortable with the rhythm of ocean exploration. The world feels complete; a vast blue expanse dotted with discoveries. Then you dive beneath the waves for the first time and find Hyrule Castle, perfectly preserved in an air bubble at the bottom of the sea. Suddenly you realize you’ve been sailing over an entire civilization. The ocean wasn’t the world, it was just the surface. ...

I spent three hours last night hand-drawing pixel fonts in Pixen, placing each dot with care. At 8x8 pixels, it was just like the many character sets I designed for my Atari 600XL in the early 1980s. Each pixel mattered then because we only had 128 characters to work with and maybe 16KB of RAM, or up to 64KB if you were lucky enough to have a RAM extension or a more expensive 800XL. Today, each pixel matters for completely different reasons: not because of technical constraints, but because those limitations force a special kind of creativity. ...

I was debugging a power issue with my thermostat last week when it hit me: I had no idea how many batteries were in my house. Not approximately. Not even close. Twenty years ago, I knew exactly where every battery lived; the TV remote, the kitchen clock, maybe a flashlight. Today? They’re everywhere and nowhere. In sensors, in remotes, in devices I’ve forgotten I own. They’ve crossed the threshold from technology to invisible infrastructure. ...