Substrate

“I want to be able to promise the folks who are using Buttondown that whatever they’re signing up for now, they’ll have five years from now, ten years from now,” Duke said. “And I think staying small and focusing on, if anything, a lack of ambition is really conducive to that.”

Buttondown doesn’t have a strict design system and as the surface area of the application increases, UI drift becomes more and more of an issue. but “hope someone with influence likes the product” isn’t a sustainable way of growing. (Knowing me, I’m not going to do this. But maybe blogging about it will push me in the right direction.)

i’ve been thinking about buttondown’s future a lot lately, trying to work out how to turn it from “growing and largely unmapped” into “sustainable and legible”. 1 i’ve been rereading seeing like a state, so legible might not be the best choice of words here, but i digress ↩

the ones with whom I can sit and stare out into the earth. but—if we’re being honest, and we are— they tackle-danced in the 2pm breeze. I bought a Casper Glow. It’s so silly, but it’s really good. But I’m quite happy, with—and you have to imagine me gesturing wildly all around me—all of this.

Procedurally generated emails are sterile. I can’t do any of my fun little kitschy things like write about the weather or include corgi gifs. I’m going to inevitably spend more time running into arcane edge cases with this fifty-line script than I’ll spend actually writing the email.