Full Width 
Shortcuts 
Sign Up 
Log In 
Articles 
Reading List More from swyx's site RSS Feed
Every time I have given up on America, it has been a mistake. And yet, America has never, ever given up on me.
I turned 40 today. For my 35th I did principles, but for my 40th, I wanted to offer perhaps more useful reflections.
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, 2) I was somewhat worried if I published it then others might diminish the techniques through overuse.
You are of course aware that attention spans are shrinking. YouTube -> Shorts, Instagram Reels, Tiktoks, etc have taken over the world.
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 to the end - the following advice is what I strongly believe for the "average" podcast that wants to do well but not necessarily being full time top tier influencer level. Also, this is primarily for professional/technical interview guest-led podcasts, but I also do have opinions on non-guest-led podcasts as well.
More in programming
In this video, we look at why fork() needs copy-on-write, how it works inside the kernel, and a memory usage problem that Instagram encountered with Python.
Comments require commitment, but they’re worth it.
My last official contribution to GitHub was something I’ve wanted for a long time: Writing the code to display an ACCESSIBILITY.md file’s contents on the repository landing page. This content lives in the same tab component that the README, License, Code of Conduct, Security, and important information is surfaced. For example, I’m using an ACESSIBILITY.md file located in ./github to communicate my accessibility statement on my a11y-webring.club repository. Here’s an image of it in action: The file only appears if it is supplied, so it is not a required part of creating or maintaining a repository. However, it is my hope that the act of providing one becomes more commonplace the same way providing those other special kinds of files are. Another broader hope I have is that this promotion of content helps to normalize accessibility as a consideration and practice in some small way—something that helps to send a signal of a mature software project. I’m excited to see how people use this new addition to the platform. I would also like to extend a huge thank you to Jan Maarten and Maria Lamardo for their help getting this effort across the finish line.
The Ware for August 2026 is the “IC unit” from a Lafayette 150-in-1 “IC Electronic Project Kit”, part number 99-35107. Above is a contextual photo of how the unit looked mounted in the kit. And above are a couple examples of projects you can build with the “IC” as part of the kit. Answering Hales’ […]
