First You Were
Substrate
Sharing a Brother’s Love
Learnings from Ketch (so far)
“thoughts from the past few weeks - think a lot of folks confuse the terms: social, messaging, communication, and consumer - you're stuck in blue bubble purgatory as friends until you have a synchronous convo 🗣 or IRL coffee - calendar battleship is a real drag for everyone”
All the Buildings of the Living
“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.”
City
Why You Should Never, Ever Use Quora
Forget about Quora's security breach. Their ongoing efforts to block access to their content, including a multi-year ban on the Internet Archive, are reason enough to never use them.
Betting on Slope
“That makes sense, except it doesn’t. Shouldn’t large organizations have more of a capacity for handling “m risk” and seek to leverage that to gain long term advantages?”
Midnight, Talking About Our Exes
Value Arcs
The more senior you are, the longer timescales you operate in. Weeks/months become year/5 years/+. And the feedback loops much longer as well (many years).That transition is tough, but what is most difficult is adapting your notion of patience and when to apply impatience.— Julia Grace (@jewelia) August 16, 2018
On Tumblr’s New Guidelines
iMessage Sticker Pack to Annotate Preview Cards
I literally made a sticker pack to help the recipient know you sent a tweet to them with multiple images or video https://t.co/BoIFaqwqB5— Trevor Kay (@trevormkay) September 26, 2018
#71: Cities Are Getting Smaller
“Places—individual stores, neighborhoods, and entire cities—are fragile, and the internet makes them more so.” “Marshall McLuhan wrote that every new medium contained another medium as its content: Speech, for example, became the content of writing, as writing became the content of print. Cities, which grew independently for so long, might now be the content of the internet.”
A Programmer’s Introduction to Mathematics
For the last four years I’ve been working on a book for programmers who want to learn mathematics. It’s finally done, and you can buy it today. The website for the book is pimbook.org, …
Roomba Naming
“I bought a roomba, please reply with a good name.”
I Sincerely Hope
Do you remember the very best meme of September?
Why September 21 is so much more than a random calendar date.
Infinite Sets that Admit Fast Exhaustive Search
Never
Making a claim that something will never be the case can feel like an invitation for the universe to prove otherwise. Fortunately for us, Swift lives up to this higher standard thanks to the unlikeliest of types.
Void
Void has no members: no methods, no values, not even a name. It’s a something more nothing than nil.
Small Fry
Lisa Brennan-Jobs’s memoir Small Fry is one of the best books I’ve read this year.
Hitting Resume
“(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.)”
The Many Sides of Friendship
Each quarter Chris Yeh and I convene about 20 of our friends on the peninsula and 20 of our friends in San Francisco for a conversation over lunch. Each lunch, called the Junto, has a theme. So far…
Finally, a new one
Small Online Shop Gifts
“As a small business owner (@tattly) I am always trying to support other small businesses. In this thread I'll mention a few small online shops I love in context of holiday season gifting. Add your recommendation in the thread?”
XOXO Holiday Market
The Peach Pack
Tomorrow's the last day to back The Peach Pack, Ami's followup to You Think You Know Me, a fun and thoughtful game worth supporting.
Keeping Things Whole
Dad
At the service, I read the eulogy below, which tried to explain why he was special to so many of us. Writing it was easy, at least in part because he wrote the best bits himself. The hard part was reading it. He laughed at his own jokes and at yours. He made it very easy to love him.
How iOS Encourages Healthy Password Practices
Calendar Mirroring
“Open sourced a small tool I use to put "Busy" events on my work calendar when I create events on my personal calendar, powered by @IFTTT and Amazon Lambda: https://t.co/22MCaIgbP9 It's run 718 times over the past year and a half with zero maintenance!”