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Login to tech Twitter and you’ll see posts bragging about 40k LoC per day from an unnamed YC member 😛. There’s some hilarity to it, but the vibe shift is real. At Jenni, we’re shipping 3-5x faster than mid-2025. I perpetually have unread notifications in our #shipped channel. Bugs go from reported to resolved in […] The post The Middle Way appeared first on Marc Astbury.
There’s a recurring take doing the rounds on socials. Thought leaders declaring that AI has killed the design process (e.g. Lenny’s podcast). I personally think they’re wrong. But more importantly, I think most people (including designers) don’t know what they mean when they say “design process.” When pushed for specifics what they’re actually describing is […] The post The Design Process appeared first on Marc Astbury.
When reading history it’s tempting to hold the question “is this person good or evil?” in mind. With Franco, Mussolini, and Hitler the answer is clear. More often it is not. World leaders must make decisions where there are severe costs regardless of which path they choose. Reading Deng Xiaoping and The Transformation of China […] The post Notes on Deng Xiaoping appeared first on Marc Astbury.
As was the case in 2023, I’m back in Yunnan writing the annual review. This time sitting in Matchbox coffee shop in Shaxi, the sky is pure blue and the farmers fields below are a dusty yellow. My fingers are freezing as I type but the pain is negated by the joy of wearing a […] The post Annual Review 2025 appeared first on Marc Astbury.
Folders, in the digital sense, began life as an ingenious skeuomorphic metaphor. A digital stand-in for physical folders and filing cabinets pioneered by Xerox and first seen in their Alto machine. The metaphor helped early computer users map the new digital world onto something they already understood. After reading The Science of Managing our Digital […] The post Folders are dead, long live folders appeared first on Marc Astbury.
More in programming
A frustrated Reddit post about being a condom between an AI and production made the rounds in our team. Here is why I think the opposite is true and what it means for how we review code, plan work and think.
And here we are three years after I wrote about the Google Pixel Fold being announced, followed now with the announcement of the iPhone Duo...(I have questions about the naming by the way). Four years ago I was talking about web primitives in the platform for the Surface Duo. My how time flies. There are CSS media features, a Viewport Segments API, a Device Posture API but Chromium based browsers are the only ones currently supporting these things. I haven't been able to find any signal yet on whether Safari will support these things in the web platform as the developer docs focus on application development. If you're interested in trying out the platform features, you can emulate the Surface Duo and Galaxy Z Fold in the developer tools. And if you're thinking, do I really have to have my website adapt to two screens? The answer is no. Adding a design to an application or dual screen makes sense if you have an experience that has two simulataneous contexts that are useful e.g. a list of email messages/inbox on one screen, an open message, email thread or email composer on the other. Here's one of my talks from 2022 if you're interested in learning more about what's available in the browser for dual screen/foldable devices. Happy building :)
After a write-up in the New York Times, Mommy Bloggers had two options. Either lean in, or step back. Given how popular it became after that, it's not hard to guess which option they chose. The post Mommy bloggers react appeared first on The History of the Web.
I'm quite a bit late on this one, but Haunt version 0.4.0 was released released back in July. I haven't had much time for blogging, but I'm catching up now! This release contains a small set of improvements and bug fixes since the 0.3.0 release in 2024. About Haunt Haunt is a static site generator that uses the Guile Scheme as its configuration language. It aims to be simple, functional, and extensible. Features include: Easy blog and Atom/RSS feed generation Markdown post support Simple development server for viewing edits before publishing Purely functional build process User extensibility Notable changes Added support for HTML in Markdown documents. This was a long time coming because guile-markdown did not support it and the library was abandoned by the original maintainer. As part of my work at Spritely, we forked it, implemented the relevant portions of the CommonMark specification, and released it. Spritely's guile-commonmark fork is now considered to be the official upstream by Guix and others. A further consequence of this is that guile-lib is now a required dependency for building Haunt as we need the (htmlprag) module to parse Markdown documents with embedded HTML. html->shtml from guile-lib's (htmlprag) module is now used instead of xml->sxml in the HTML reader. It was silly of me to use xml->sxml for this purpose years ago, but at the time I wanted guile-lib to be an optional dependency. Added haunt new subcommand for creating a new site. Added default directory, template, and prefix arguments to flat-pages procedure. Added support for index metadata flag to flat pages for pretty URLs. Flat pages now receive all page metadata, not just the page title. This is a breaking change from 0.3.0. Added .scm as an additional extension for sxml-reader. make-file-extension-matcher now supports multiple extensions. Fixed emission of <script> and <style> elements. Fixed handling of no available reader in flat pages builder. Fixed unreachable error handling clause when a reader is not found for a post. Fixed default blog theme template missing an <html> tag. Fixed overloaded -h option in haunt serve. Deprecated post in Skribe reader in favor of document. Download Haunt 0.4.0 is already available in Guix: guix pull guix install haunt See the Haunt project page for information on how to build from source. Thank you to Camilo Rodrigues, Noé Lopez, jgart, Jakob L. Kreuze, and Daniel Meißner for their contributions to this release! Happy haunting!
