Substrate

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I’d rather spend my time with my family or doing things outside or learning new things than making software every waking moment. Now when I work on things on the side, it’s because I want to.

Last weekend I had a wonderful trip to my friend’s hermitage in remote Vermont. He lives there as a buddhist monk. I had a chance to recharge, walk through the snowy fields and drink tea with him. His official monk name is Brother Phap Man. Every evening of the few days I spent there, he […]

The most interesting product of Twitter’s popularity, to me, has been the explosion of Twitter API client software.

微风☁️🌱 pic.twitter.com/jT6VJty99v— 邦乔彦 (@bangjoy1992) March 12, 2019

“Our habits tend to fall into local maxima. We choose well compared to similar alternatives, but ignore options that are totally different yet possibly better. Machine learning algorithms avoid local maxima by occasionally testing random permutations, with techniques like simulated annealing.”

“I have hung prints of this poem by @officialdonika in our bedroom AND office, in case you were wondering about what I’m like”

“And that is completely at odds with the tech industry's business model. Anyway, that's why I keep pointing to employee-owned grow/distribution companies as the solution to bad ag & food problems, not the tech industry.”

Apparently MTA (the company running the NYC subway) has a real-time API. My fascination for the subway takes autistic proportions and so obviously I had to analyze some of the data.

A junior developer wants to rule the world.

Personal site for John Feminella: software engineer · enthusiastic technologist · curiosity advocate

“They had to develop cultures of safety. That often means specific social safeguards. Those ‘ossified corporate structures’ that Silicon Valley hates so much because they ‘keep you from moving fast’? Yeah, a lot of them exist to keep top brass from doing hideously stupid things.”

Thanks for reading! Hopefully with your help we'll be wishing the Web a happy 60th birthday in another thirty years. 😍🌐— John F🎃minella 🌠 (@jxxf) March 12, 2019

A group of hedgehogs is called an array, which means that everything in an array is a hedgehog, I don't make the rules pic.twitter.com/b74ht98yQh— spooky action at a distance (@qntm) March 12, 2019

Two exes give each other dating advice. What can possibly go wrong?

“If you're up against a case in your own organization where it seems like folks are going down the DIY route, the lever to push back on is really ③. Make sure folks understand that going down that road can be an expensive one, and that a big commitment will be required.”

“it makes more sense to me to analyze social media platforms in terms of "social capital" than things like "dopamine hits," but they often end up being treated as the same thing https://t.co/ryHo7OGAGr”

Ryan Putnam is an illustrator, art director, and potter. Browse Putnam’s work and buy prints, ceramics, and original artwork.

“On the other side of terror my own intelligence and love waits, and it is always, always better to respond to conflict from those parts of me. Terror is a mad dog who needs love, not the wheel.”

BAD METAPHORS is an ongoing series that takes a critical look at the figures of speech that shuttle between technology and everyday life. In the gentle shrugging off of blame, “bandwidth” as metaphor becomes a useful distortion, since there is no regulatory body assigning us an emotional frequency spectrum. When we discuss feelings and relationships in terms of “bandwidth” we are treating them like megabits of information.

FYI fellow Mail users, keep this box unchecked to disable all those gross email clients that track your opening / reading of emails. pic.twitter.com/eW9wMAHt7B— Sebastiaan de With (@sdw) March 10, 2019

That is why we need to stop discussing “the environment” and “nature” as if it was outside the world inhabited by humanity. ​ If we are animals, evolving within the complex dynamic of our ecosystem, then our fate is about how well we function within that ecosystem, not about escaping to other planets after trashing this one. ​ Today the global industrial economy is destroying ecosystems, leveling mountains, and spewing hydrocarbons and toxic chemicals into the air and water, and it is not doing all these things to magnanimously create “jobs” or to improve the lives of humans in general. It is doing these things to make profit for financial investors. This is not about civilizational “progress”, it is about justifying continuing inequality and ecocide.

Those steps climb upward to some unknown but presumed better end ​ When you strip everything away what are those few things that remain true throughout every incremental technological advancement. It’s no longer a staircase on a timeline, but a single immutable point. ​ Truths that are inherently long term, inherently valuable—and the foundation for meaningful innovation.

dragging last night’s hair and last night’s outfit past fresh-faced soccer moms already awake to face the day. It’s true that obligation in love is unavoidable, but it’s also one of the best gifts romantic love offers; our selves who turn toward obligation are generally our best selves, willing to do what is difficult over what is available, willing to pull up out of our habits and into our better potential. The obligation of romance has the capacity to teach us to do this in a larger sense. It acts act as a lesson in accountability. At least I know that it has for me.

For me, the genius of Mailbox was twofold. First, using it simply felt faster than any email app I ever used. It pre-fetched messages in the background; whenever you opened it you could start dealing with the daily horror of your inbox right away. Second, using it was satisfying in a way no other email client was: every time I swiped my fat thumb on a message, banishing it to the archive, the email turned a lustrous green. Mailbox was good for dashing off quick replies, but it was best-in-class for cleaning house. Every time I found myself standing in a line, I’d open up Mailbox and positively murder my inbox. Mailbox turned you into an email assassin.

But I was accountable to our creators, our employees, and our investors–in that order. That’s what I told every new hire and every investor. I didn’t want to become a serial entrepreneur, and risk disappointing another customer base. and this was the first time in my life when the present year felt worse than the last. There was a path to an independent business, not beholden to the go-big-or-go-home mentality I signed up for when I raised money. So instead of pretending to be some sort of product visionary, trying to build a billion-dollar company, I’m just focused on making Gumroad better and better for our existing creators. Because they are the ones that have kept us alive. Instead of freaking out about how ‘small’ Gumroad actually is (like I thought they would), our creators have grown more loyal. It feels like we’re all in this together, trying to do earn a living doing what we love.

And yet for all that power, the basis of these world shaping ideas is really very small and fundamental; layers seated directly on top of fundamental truths: life and death, attention as identity, and the arrow of time. What’s striking to me is the magnitude of impact created through these different layers because of their proximity to something very fundamental. There is little to no opportunity depth, there is only vast potential upward. The future will be catalyzed by those exposing fundamental truths and created by those who are willing to thoroughly understand and leverage the power of those truths directly. But those truths will be far easier to find when you are looking for the layers obscuring them from view.

Many years ago, my coach Jerry Colonna from Reboot taught me the idea of a “red / yellow / green” check-in. In a nutshell, it’s a practice where meeting participants kick off a me…