I first started compiling "How To Thought Lead" in my notes 5 years ago, at first as an ironic parody and then slowly becoming sincere, and never published it, 1) because I don't know if I ever really nailed it / have a complete picture,...
There was a famous Covid era chart that I always struggle to find, showing how hard it is to estimate an S curve while living through it. in the early days it seems that everything is exploding as an exponential and you always get hypey essays about...
Through my 4 (!) podcasts I obviously have built up a lot of opinions on podcasting over the years. Here's some of them. The two outlier podcasts of our time are Dwarkesh and TBPN, and I will explain my mental model of them in a separate post -...
another talk I am giving at Mastra's TypeScript AI conf today https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1NnQ3H5Bki3vWRRJdVXoCFJ5dsNKH9QrC-eEQ2Z8olck/edit?usp=sharing
My thesis for the future of software dev agents. This is a hastily written blogpost done on not a lot of sleep, so pardon poor pacing and structure and typos and mistakes but just getting it out there.
at long last, Gemini Nano is almost here for all Chrome users (i was originally misinformed that it was in Chrome 138 - but i checked my own facts and since Chrome 137+ it is starting to be shipped unflagged in limited situations). I was reminded by...
someone I resonate a lot with is Naval Ravikant - his classic "How to Get Rich Without Getting Lucky" (henceforth HTGR) is formative to a lot of my thinking, including How to Market Yourself Without Being A Celebrity and "Play Long Term...
I made an expensive technical decision on Phoenix Liveview for the Smol Talk webapp about a year ago that I now regret, and am jotting down some notes to self for why.
I turned a birthday recently and it was so busy (DataCouncil + sg flight) that i never really got the chance to sit and reflect. a lot of things are going well, lots more could be better. I'm the only person responsible for preserving the good and...
I recently kicked off a 99designs contest for a new logo: https://99designs.com/logo-design/contests/logo-brand-ai-engineering-podcast-help-define-industry-1307842/
this is the tracking doc for my talk on "Engineering AI Agents" for OpenAI DevDay Singapore. I'll add photos and notes and stuff when i'm done. note that the full slides contain a lot more info that i had to cut out of the ~~10~~ 9 minute talk.
2026 update: used Lugg to move a sectional sofabed couch and ended up regretting it - it cost $222.51 one way (44min labor pickup 55min labor dropoff, which i think was fraud, no way dropoff cost more than pickup) and total base fare 38 + 14.5 fee....
4.5 years after my initial podcast inventory, with COVID and a career change under my belt, with my OPML file growing from 566 rss feeds in 2022 to 771* in 2024 (with quite a few of my fave NPR podcasts dying), and my backlog mounting to 43GB...
note... this only represents my half of running AIE - the intention was to have Ben also write his side on the logistics and sponsorships but we never got round to it and its been a year and a half so... you get what you get, this brain dump of stuff....
A collection of public thoughts that could be blogposts but i dont have time, so here, have the short form. I may upgrade these to full posts in future.
A collection of public thoughts that could be blogposts but i dont have time, so here, have the short form. I may upgrade these to full posts in future.
There was a time, before the screens took over, when people read these things called "books". Remarkably efficient things. Always-on display. Could survive dropping from a great height. Somewhat fragile but who cares when you could mass...
The new iPhones ditched the physical mute button with a software enabled action button, that allows some customization. the highest degree of customization is Shortcuts. Apple's default transcription is terrible. I got a new iPhone recently and so...
As someone who does a lot of my learning via podcasts, I've been putting up picks lists for 4 years straight (see main 2019 list, then my 2020 and 2021 and 2022 diffs), so it's time to do year 5(!)
I was recently involved in moderating a chat with Kanjun Qiu of Imbue at the MIT AI conf: https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNJ9i78ICeg2YuemyAXmtStKvqr9l0Tao3xQWxmeAVjBALHn_NnFvPXFlNSkdMfqA?pli=1&key=dTFRRHBTLVRZTEVCem0zal8tNVkxblh0V3k4VXhR
I last talked about my Latent Space adventures in April and last December. Even as a well regarded developer-part-time-creator, the Latent Space Newsletter + Pod has done much better than I usually do. Here are the stats as of today:
My smol menubar project utilizes Electron's special webview tag to dynamically generate a list of sub browser windows for chat. For the last couple months I've had an issue with the SSO popups in this, namely that they just don't work at...
note - this is a hasty written braindump of feelings as emotions as I don't have the time to polish this essay up to my usual standards, but still wanted to capture this important moment and end in my life. pardon any poorly phrased and organized...
as a cheapo who uses Apple iCloud (the world's worst sync service) as a sync service for my Obsidian Second Brain, I have recently run into this issue a lot:
One of the most common problems in the beginning stage of a founder journey is establishing the cofounder group. I thought I would jot down some notes from my own experience + that of friends in similar situations.
I've been quite inspired by David Sacks' The Cadence ever since I read it. It prescribes an operational process and ideal team structure for a 50-500 person startup - running sales, finance, product, and marketing in sync in quarterly cycles...
I have just received my O1A Visa and like for the H1B1, I figured I should write down my experience, thoughts, and tips for those who may wish to make the same journey. Note that I am not a professional at this, I'm just a guy who recently went...
some of you may know I've recently started a new company. I'm not ready to talk about -that- yet, but I did want to capture some notes on logistical stuff I have had to ramp up on as a first time founder. hopefully this helps somebody out there.
I last wrote about Ranking #1 on HN in December, and wanted to offer an update from my mild hit today. I am now taking Latent Space (the new name enabled by the previous owner of that domain selling it to me in my first P2P domain purchase) a lot more...
I honestly never expected this to be a topic that was common enough to write up, however, it suddenly hit me today that it is the ultra niche topics that deserve writing up since it is the stuff that is outside the usual SERP riffraff.
As someone who does a lot of my learning via podcasts, I've been putting up picks lists for 3 years straight (see main 2019 list, then my 2020 and 2021 diffs), so it's time to do year 4 (!)
For those who weren't aware (you would be if you were subscribed on email!), I started a separate AI blog, L-space Diaries, this year to 1) try out Substack in anger and 2) create a focused feed on a topic rather than a person (I also started DX...
This post was written as a reflection at the first Dev Writers Retreat. It's been really weird doing this in the PermaParty city while the world seemingly falls apart outside. Here's my attempt to make sense of it.
We use Docusaurus at work, and while it shipped v2 this year it still has (as of v2.3) not shipped with any Tailwind support at all. Googled and found this post which was almost everything I needed, but required some stuff in the comments for it to work.
How to break the cold start problem in content creation as a new entrant to any field, and getting the leaders of that field to at least read your writing and know your name.
Today's fun emergency at work was a first - writing a security postmortem for a breach of an open source user (aka not a breach of us, which seems the norm).
This week in a Svelte Radio recording, @rich-harris commented that something I said was "uniquely swyx": an offhand observation that "we are all professional streamers now" [^1]. I responded that I've been calling this behavior...
I use iCloud as my syncing engine for my Obsidian Second Brain, and twice now I've seen iCloud get corrupted into a really bad state. I also back up everything to github, so I dont really experience much data loss, but it is annoying to see iCloud...
We had a delightful discussion on the importance of writing weekly updates in this week's Coding Career Community meetup. I rarely get so excited about an idea I immediately know I need to start doing it, so I'm choosing to write it up to...
My recent End of Localhost piece on Hacker News came with the usual dash of HN criticism devolving into blaming beginners for not knowing the same parts of the stack that they consider mandatory:
I've been unhappy with my tweet rendering strategy for a while - Twitter encourages you to use their heavy JS script to render tweets, which undoubtedly heaps all sorts of tracking on the reader, docks your lighthouse performance score by ~17...
These are the raw notes of my talk prep for my React Miami 2022 talk - Temporal - React for the Backend. Includes links and initial draft at the bottom.
TurboRepo is a big deal for the JS community because it addresses the monorepo problem head on, bringing 85% faster build speeds and great architecture/docs/marketing.
EDA tools like Datasette dramatically lower the cost of data analysis, with a surprisingly simple ELT contract - You handle the Extract phase, it handles the Load, and exposes a standard UI for you to do dynamic Transforms.
The default Transistor.fm website is kinda ugly. Here's how to customize your Transistor.fm website if you use Transistor. But also it's a simple guide to do clientside customizations of almost any website whose code you don't control.
Improvements in DX in both programming languages and cloud infrastructure will eventually converge in a single paradigm, where you truly "just write business logic" and the platform mostly figures out the rest.
DevRel is hot but nobody knows how to measure it. That's because we don't agree on what effective DevRel is, and we don't agree on the tradeoffs of lagging vs leading metrics for a creative, unattributable, intimately human endeavor.
Learning is BOTH a discrete and a continuous process. If the tools we use don't respect this duality, information is lost — either writing involves too much effort, or reading requires too much context.
The 'API Economy' is a popular term for VC's and tech media, however Developers seem ironically out of the loop despite their central importance to the whole story. Here's my explanation, together with a dash of economics and social...
'I will find free money for you' is one of my favorite business models. Here's a quick definition of Found-Money Startups and a short list I've been keeping.
A lightning fast overview of everything you need to know to set up a REST endpoint with full CRUD capability with AWS Lambda, DynamoDB and AWS Amplify in 2 minutes.
I care a lot about creating Cool URIs so I have been paralyzed more than I should be about what I'm calling "URL Architecture". In true fashion, I'm blogging about it.
I'm starting to feel some RSI in my left hand. It's a matter of time. I decided to collect some information about it to make improvements now rather than later.
Here's a recorded screenshare chat I had with Sean Grove (https://twitter.com/sgrove), Cofounder of OneGraph! We swapped out the Next.js API Routes that I manually set up in my livestreaming, to the premade GraphQL integration that OneGraph has...
In my livestream today I had the need to bring in a spinner component to show work in progress in my app. However found that existing React spinners were too heavy. That's when I had the idea to use web components in my Next.js (React/Preact) app...
Gatsby-Remark is one of those fun plugins that have their own plugins - but there are a lot of them. Here's a list I wrote down a few months ago of plugins I think everyone should use.
The US is probably going into recession - here's why I'm talking about it now, what it could look like, what Devs can do to prepare, and why it's not the End of the World.
This is my attempt to explicitly define a not-legally-binding "terms of service" for people who peruse Digital Gardens, and the people who Learn in Public with them.
I dipped into my automation repo today and explored Huginn. It didn't really appeal so I looked for alternatives and found Node-RED. It uses a much more familiar toolchain (JS) and is draggy-droppy which I likey!
People can't use your code without docs. People might get overwhelmed with too many docs. How can we match the maturity of docs to the maturity of the project?
As Moore's Law ends, devices multiply, and software becomes critical to life, we must take another look at our full stack for continued gains in efficiency, reliability and security.
Of course I don't think that everything should be public. I don't even think everyone should Learn In Public. The majority of the time you are still learning in private. Here are some thoughts on how to do it well.
When talking about "Narrow Waists" I should clarify that I'm only referring to the term from the somewhat obscure "Internet Architecture" model of the different technology layers (my notes here):
I recently made a mistake. I make many, but this involved someone important to me and to people I know, so it stands out among the general cacophony of my many other failures. I wanted to own up to what I did, explain how I handled it, and in general...
Borrowing heavily from Gatsby Themes to improve the Sapper developer experience, and a discussion of how Ejectable Defaults fits with the Zero Config movement
The worlds of software, business, and music use the word "Waterfall" incredibly differently and they are completely ignorant of each other. I figured I would make a quick note to compare and contrast them!
This blog now uses Svelte & Sapper as a static site generator, where it previously used React & Gatsby. This is achieved through Sapper's sapper export feature.
Gatsby is more than a simple static site generator. It uses JavaScript to rehydrate Markup into a fully dynamic React app - which means you can use APIs to do all sorts of dynamic functionality!
I enjoyed listening to Des and Paul's discussion of keyboard-first apps on their podcast today. They discussed the rise of the cmd+K UI paradigm in apps like:
Today I dropped out of the Compilers course I accidentally registered myself for. I'm not proud of it but there's too much I want to do and I know I'm just going to do a shit job at everything by spreading my self thin and also putting an...
I thought I would write a quick coda to my Netlify Year One Recap. That post was entirely me looking back at myself. It's helpful to see what others said about me at my review.
There is a possible "React Native Web Singularity", when it starts being a better standalone choice for developing for the mobile web than react-dom. If this speculation comes true, this would be gamechanging.
I broke past 10,000 Twitter followers on Saturday. Obviously this is a completely arbitrary milestone and pretty minor in the hierarchy of needs. I'm not celebrating.
With the growing community interest in Gatsby, we hope to create more resources that make it easier for anyone to grasp the power of this incredible tool.
I'm writing to you from a cheap hostel in downtown Toronto (Hostelling International, highly recommend for solo travel, I have stayed in SF, LA, NY, PHL, TO, NZ and more I probably forget) where a cute anecdote just happened that illustrates an...
Adding authentication is a pain point for many React beginners. We’ve made it ridiculously easy to add Netlify Identity onto any React app, including create-react-app, Gatsby, Next.js, or any other setup you may have, by wrapping it all into one...
This was just a short rant I prepared for Netlify's Allhands where we were asked to give a short lightning talk on any topic we wished. I picked cuttles. I actually saw one in real life diving in Fiji once!
Gatsby is great for not only static sites but also traditional web applications. You can add authentication and serverless functionality and get up and running incredibly quickly with Netlify - here's how.