Articles

Do "outline speedrunning": Recursively outline an MVP, speedrun filling it in, and only then go back and perfect. This is a ~10x speed up over the 'loading-bar' style (more on that below) Don't just read this article and move on. Go out and do this for the very next thing you make so y

I’m often asked to edit friends’ or coworkers’ writing, anything from emails to short stories to documentation. Recently, someone asked me how I edit. What am I looking for? How do I know what changes to make? That made me stop and think about what I’ve been doing semi-instinctually.

Learn how to write poetry and poetry tips for beginners from a popular literary magazine, From Whispers to Roars.

Writing about a topic can often sound boring or worthless. But there are significant benefits to doing it from time to time.

I learned things

The Space Shuttle contained a bulky printer so the astronauts could receive procedures, mission plans, weather reports, crew activity plans,...

Chile is so long, it's curved. How long is it? Why not longer? Why is no other country as thin? How does that make Chileans incomprehensible?

Helicopters are perhaps at their coolest when they’re being used as flying cranes — from a long dangling cable, they can carry everything from cars, to crates, to giant hanging saws. Wh…

This post is the start of a series on how to debug Common Lisp code, specifically with Emacs, Slime, and SBCL. If you do not understand Common Lisp, you should still be able to follow along and recognize just how powerful the facilities provided by the Common Lisp debugger are. Nathan Marz asked me to […]

When MIT and Quaker Oats paired up to conduct experiments on unsuspecting young boys

A man passes away without a word in the mountains of North Carolina, and his grandson sets out to write about the importance of a seemingly unimportant life.

Within weeks of finishing his final painting, a murder scene, the artist was himself dead.

The whole idea of progressive enhancement is using the power that the web platform gives us for free — specifically, HTML, CSS and JavaScript — to provide a baseline experience for the people who visit our sites and/or apps, and then build on that where appropriate and necessary, depending on the capabilities of the technology that they […]

Advice to developers entering the industry: the best investment is in yourself.

Want to learn how to decode a barcode by hand? We'll take a look at its data structure and tell you how! ➜ Lean more

The Markov numbers reveal the secrets of irrational numbers and the patterns of the Fibonacci sequence. But there’s one question about them that has resisted proof for over a century.

Exclusive: the $80 Lego Ideas Polaroid OneStep — and how it was made.

The explorer’s fantastical account of Indigenous life was sent to King Ferdinand and printed for mass consumption.

A recent scientific study delves into the details of the secret operation in which the U.S. refloated part of a Soviet missile launcher, which was sunk at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean

I spent a recent flight finding out what I could do with an connection to the flight’s wifi, but without access to the internet. I was on my way home from Strange Loop, on a flight from St. Louis to Oakland. It’s a long enough flight that I planned to purchase the $8 internet access and get some work done, but Southwest’s wifi portal wouldn’t accept any form of payment.

Sometimes they produce it, too

It was near impossible to convict scammers of fraud because jurors had a hard time believing that people would willingly engage in self-mutilation.

While ABS may be the most well-known plastic used by LEGO, they actually use a wide variety of plastics. Here’s an example of all the kinds of plastic used by LEGO provided by BrickNerd guest contributor Ryan Howerter.