“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.”

he is prone and snoring on the carpet, equidistant between my partner and me. It’s a mundane thing, and I look forward to a long life of such mundane things as this. ​ I want to steal a friend’s idea of “holding office hours for chats with friends” next year by making more room for FaceTime and phone calls, which drain me and distract me so much less than being constantly alt-tabbing to Messages.app.

I’m an engineer at Stripe. I run Buttondown and Spoonbill. I love Python, cocktails, poetry, and you.

I’m old enough to know my faults, if not yet old enough to fix them: I know that I have a tendency to compartmentalize, and to deal with things outside of my control by tunnel-visioning on the things I do. I’m saying that in times where you find yourself enchanted and disgusted by the spiral of things, you get to do whatever you can to grant yourself a bit of sanity.

I’ve committed to donating at least 20% of Buttondown’s profits to the software that enables it. This is a relatively low number in absolute terms—I'm certainly not changing anyone’s life—but I think it’s still important.

and doing things without a sense of traffic flying overhead, feels much better and much more sustainable. ​ mostly, though, i catch myself happy, and i do what Vonnegut tells me to do: And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’ ​ i’m going to bed earlier and earlier; i’m going to bed happier and happier. there is so much to be done it is perfect

this is the appeal of Zoom, to me, almost as an anti-silicon valley company: they took a bad product and just made it good.

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.)

my philosophy on blogging has shifted from “every essay must be a perfect, shimmering artifact” to “blog posts should be short, authentic, and flawed transportation devices”. they mark off from ten to noon and three to five as “engineering time”, and spend the intervening three hours doing anything but programming. I am growing more and more tempted to steal this for myself. those “correct” Sundays, where you flit from obligation to obligation and never grow tired enough to require pause.

a lot of my maturation as a developer has come from realizing that intuition is a disease and a crutch rather than a thing that should be relied on in lieu of formal verifications: the goal should be to delay intuition until it is reified in a thing that exists beyond your mind.

but jet lag has a way of making even comfortable beds in comfortable neighborhoods seem foreign. There should be a term for this sort of chain reaction of literary progeny: you read a book that forces you to read a book that forces you to read a book, the textual equivalent of a wild night out. but I just want to fade the instinct a little bit, to train myself for more durable content.

and of course, my mother is upset at me for not having sent her any yet to begin the ritual of unpacking, to return to my old habits and objects and find all of them a little richer from the time spent away. My to-do list is very long right now, and I’ll be spending the rest of this Sunday in my inbox. But I am so much happier than I was this time last week — my legs more tired and my head less fogged.

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.

One of my first interactions with a Principal 1 at Amazon was a design review for a design owned by a team that was not mine, merely adjacent to mine. Because I was 21 and a dumbass, I thought that this older guy would hew closer to a PM or a manager and say some sort of irrelevant/ignorant set of remarks rather than a bunch of clever, reasonable, and forward-looking things, and of course the latter is what he did. Amazon’s flavor of title to designate “extremely distinguished engineer” ↩

I’m an engineer at Stripe. I run Buttondown and Spoonbill. I love Python, cocktails, poetry, and you.

I did not realize the city was so large. Brooklyn alone is the size of seattle. I knew the boroughs were a thing, but I figured they were just big neighborhoods, not entities unto themselves. There was trash everywhere. like, everywhere. which is not to say it was dirty, but just that there were so many bags of trash. So many Canada Goose jackets. So many dogs. So many Canada Goose jackets on dogs. Everyone, and I mean everyone, was extremely lovely and kind. An order of magnitude more diversity than any city in which I’ve lived. The subway’s weird turnstile-claw-revolving-door things are dystopian. Park Ave. is breathtaking; so is East Village. You look into each little brownstone and a part of you wants to stay there forever. Everything is a little bit louder than it should be. I miss it already! I miss it so much.

“and faintly like I'm cosplaying as a different, more well-adjusted version of myself.” “I am growing a beard now. This is terrible news for everyone involved.” “I am worried (albeit only faintly) that if OmniFocus doesn't work, it will less be a failure of the software (which seems very nice) and more a failure of that underlying assumption: that you cannot, in fact, sit down and think for a long time and emerge with a roadmap for the best possible 2019, a glorious lattice of checklists and todos.”

“And of all the things I did this year that I'm proud of — finding my dream job, running my first 10K, beginning to write poetry again — Buttondown's growth and success might be the biggest one.”

“(I am writing this across the room from an absolute unit of a black lab, whose name I imagine to be Bear or perhaps Winchester, whom I am summoning the energy and wherewithal to go up and pet.)”

“I’m neither wise nor smart enough to answer the question Is Amazon good for Seattle? But the position of most non-Amazon tech companies in Seattle is that they’re thankful for Amazon’s presence, if for no other reason that they act as a lightning rod for all criticism of Seattle’s rapid upheaval.”