Substrate

“I know it's a tall thing. But words matter.”

I’m so excited for Substack.

A look at the winners of the 2018 iPhone Photography Awards

“One of the things that makes RC unique is that everyone has the rare opportunity to take responsibility for and direct their own learning — from deciding what is important to them to what their goals are and how to achieve them. At the same time, RC is at its best when everyone is mindful and supportive of each other’s learning goals. Bifurcating our community into “Recursers” and “residents” does not help this.”

Kaitlin is slowly trickling out teasers for her upcoming project

Justin knocked this one out of the park.

Probably my favorite WBW post to date

“...representative of the sort of slippage I want to avoid; I should and will do better, even if that means taking more time off when appropriate. Many of you have emailed me over the years on precisely this point, and I’m ready to listen.” Thompson’s cadence has always been bafflingly impressive. This is the first mention I’ve read from him about rest—a gentle reminder that we’re all human.

“PS Please excuse my not mailing this — but I don’t know your new address.”

“When Twitter the company moves too slowly, we make Twitter the product into what we want.”

“Manhattan is quiet and cocoonish when it's cold. The entire city goes into hibernation mode, and communal solitude has to be one of the loveliest things I've experienced.”

“...being weird as a teenager is generally good.”

“These are tools, not requirements. Don’t let them make you miserable. Tune them until they bring you pleasure.”

To leave something important to you unrefined — uniterated, firstdrafted — is the laziest safety net you can deploy.

“When refactoring, you know more about the domain than when the code was first written, so can unwind the erroneous assumptions of the past. You can make much more educated guesses at what the code will need to do in the future, and can structure it accordingly. You can see where the performance problems have been, and whether performance is in fact something you should be worried about at all.”

“But if you want to become a better developer, and you want to do it by reading books, and you ask me what books you should read, I am going to recommend that you read The Odyssey. And Ogilvy on Advertising. And The Fire Next Time. And The Elements of Color. And maybe some Murakami and Vonnegut, sure. And Claudia Rankine and Herman Melville and René Girard and Italo Calvino. And Plath and DuBois and McCullough and García Márquez.”

“Not knowing the source of this inspiration makes the concept of Anti-Flow at odds with a working day which perhaps makes a bike ride a better place to Anti-Flow. It’s one of the reasons when my wife asks me, ‘Do you get bored on three-hour rides?’ I respond honestly, ‘It’s when I do my most important work.’”

you could scatter his whole mind across a field.

you couldn’t browse the web without seeing RSS icons of all persuasions gracing the façades of Web 1.0’s finest.

I was an economics major in college, and I've been grateful ever since for a few key concepts those courses drilled into me: things like opp

I became well-rehearsed in failed attempts, and so much more patient as a result. ​ As a result, my tolerance for frustration is so much higher. I’m convinced that the seeds of patience and resilience were planted and sprouted in those math notebooks. ​ The art lies in knowing which tool to grab ​ And just because I arrived at an answer, didn’t immediately make it the right one. ​ Answering that question directly is a mistake. When are you going to need to factor a polynomial in the “real world”? Maybe never, kid. Especially not with that attitude. But when are you going to face a problem that requires focusing for more than 30 seconds? All the goddamn time. ​ I needed that bottom row of math textbooks. They were my anchor. The bedrock. The foundation for much of what I’ve learned, and a sturdy base for everything still to come. ​ At times, I hated math. And yet, six years later, I’m so grateful that I studied it. The reasons have nothing to do with numbers and everything to do with life.

and spoke two words that will dramatically change my life. ​ I know that, on my death bed, I would regret not giving this a shot. I know that I would say “why did I work, rather than just trying to make it by myself”. I don’t want to make that mistake. ​ The well-traveled road brings less surprise, but is paved with the regret of poorly trodden forks not taken. ​ I would be remiss to write this post without mentioning you. It is expressly because of the people that read this website — like you — and the people that listen to my podcasts — like you — and the people that watch my videos — like you — that I’m able to make this leap. Without you giving me your attention, my family would not be afforded this amazing opportunity. ​ I can think of only a couple other pairs of words that have had similar impact on my life. Coincidentally, they were both spoken by Erin: “I do.” “I’m pregnant.”

Any company that cares about their employees’ bodies enough to have a chef and a gym, should also offer something for the mind. Imagine how it changes the recruiting conversation to say “we have an onsite independent bookstore” as one of the amenities.

and the flavors are so muted that drinking, say, LaCroix’s “muré pepino” is more like having someone gently whisper “blackberries and cucumber” in your ear than tasting either a blackberry or a cucumber. What differentiates seltzer from plain old water are the ephemeral qualities of smell and texture, and they begin to dissipate as soon as you pop the tab. Like Swiss cheese, it’s a product that’s defined as much by what’s not there than what is: Seltzer is nothingness, bottled and branded. This isn’t a story about death, not really. I just have to tell you about death so I can tell you about seltzer, because that’s how I can tell you that everyone you love is going to live forever. ​ It wasn’t just nothing, it was a placeless nothing, so LaCroix was free to be anything to anyone, anywhere. In an age of personal branding, online self-realization, and individualized versions of truth, LaCroix could take on any qualities of its consumer. It became a mirror. ​ To use freshman-year Marxist terms, social media replaces interaction between people with interaction between objects. All content, from a selfie to my mom’s last words to this article, is nothing; it only becomes something when it’s seen by someone else. ​ The fact that you never know who a hashtag is going to hook makes it something more than a way to interact with brands — a hashtag is a seance, mediating the space between constructed identities. It’s a way of reaching out, in hope and longing, into the ether. In this way, it performs the same function as art or prayer, linking tangible worlds to transcendent ones, an invisible line cast out with the hope of connection and of becoming whole, if only for a moment, right before the bubble bursts. ​ Content may be nothing, but nothing has two faces, emptiness and infinite potential, facts and ephemera. ​ I don’t remember much of what I said at my mother’s service. I know I tried to say that she was still a part of me, that she was alive where we all keep the people we love alive inside ourselves, but wasn’t able to get much of that out. This piece is how I finally said what I wanted to say. Maybe once it’s shot into the ether of the internet, it’ll take its place there with all the ads and memes and YouTube comments and every other bit of flotsam that’s thrust out with desperate apathy and the unspoken prayer that someone, anyone will notice. It, too, will be nothing, but by being nothing, it can be a point of momentary connection, a ghost that fades from view when it’s no longer in the corner of your eye. Like memories of the people you love, the act of willing these points of connection into being can exist long after the tangible things that put them into the world have disappeared.

"I know someone who tracks contacting friends in OmniFocus – which sounds almost callous at first blush, but really strike me as a deep expression of caring"

A thing that affords play, then, is a thing that suggests playful uses; a thing that naturally guides its user towards a playful state of mind. ​ The very existence of a reliable undo command is an open invitation to engage in playful experimentation A canvas or sketchbook serves as an “external imagination”, where an artist can grow an idea from birth to maturity by continuously reacting to what’s in front of him. ​ Consider what it’s like to play Super Mario Bros. for the first time. Now consider what it’s like to write, say, a shell script for the first time. In both scenarios, your challenge involves learning how to manipulate a wildly complex system in order to achieve a desired outcome. But so far, I’ve yet to meet anyone who had a harder time learning Super Mario Bros. than learning to program ​ an unfortunate trend in contemporary games is to spell out every detail in a hand-holding “tutorial” session at the outset of a game – unfortunate because it shows both a great deal of contempt for the player’s intuition and a lack of confidence in the designer’s own design. but more than that, it’s a design failure because it tells the player the rules instead of allowing her to learn them. ​ sharp relief Why, then, do people learn to program through tutorials and exercises that tell rather than show? Perhaps because the tools, languages, and environments embraced by modern programming practice are at best indifferent and at worst actively hostile to play. When you first launch Super Mario Bros., you’re greeted by an engaging, reactive first level designed to guide you gently into the world of the game. When you first launch the Unix shell, you’re confronted by an empty, inscrutable command line that will reject, with a tersely worded error message, almost anything you choose to type.

Credibility is the currency of leadership. If you read nothing else, if you remember nothing else, remember that. It will help you everywhere you go, and it will help you assess ot...