Full Width [alt+shift+f] Shortcuts [alt+shift+k]
Sign Up [alt+shift+s] Log In [alt+shift+l]

Applied Cartography

Applied Cartography
Order, Tailwind, DRY (Order in the CSS rule sense, not the metaphysical sense.) The time has come to begin exfiltrating...
a month ago
47
a month ago
(Order in the CSS rule sense, not the metaphysical sense.) The time has come to begin exfiltrating some higher-traffic, higher-leverage parts of Buttondown's admin UI away from the autogenerated Django admin and into some more bespoke components. Take, for instance, this rather...
Applied Cartography
Linear I invited nickd to join our Linear instance yesterday, which reminded me that I had a slew of notes...
a month ago
34
a month ago
I invited nickd to join our Linear instance yesterday, which reminded me that I had a slew of notes I wanted to publish on our own experience of migrating from GitHub Issues to Linear, and some reflections on it as a product now that we've been using it for a few months. One...
Applied Cartography
January, 2025 Hello, 2025! (As always, Death Cab remains the soundtrack by which you should read this.) Headlining...
3 weeks ago
29
3 weeks ago
Hello, 2025! (As always, Death Cab remains the soundtrack by which you should read this.) Headlining this month was my annual review; everything else is flotsam. But, speaking of flotsam: A quick development note on the order attribute in CSS Notes on Linear and Fathom Why...
Applied Cartography
buttondown.com/alternatives Some kind words from Chris Krycho on Buttondown's Alternatives page: This is how I want all my tools...
a month ago
28
a month ago
Some kind words from Chris Krycho on Buttondown's Alternatives page: This is how I want all my tools to be. There is a ton of room in these markets for healthy and friendly competition — and no need at all for winner-take-all or monopolist attitudes. First off — credit where it's...
Applied Cartography
November, 2024 Not a lot to share this month; it was a particularly busy time, between a mystery (and now solved,...
a month ago
20
a month ago
Not a lot to share this month; it was a particularly busy time, between a mystery (and now solved, without fanfare or closure) cough and a dearth of time to write as I started to explore easing back into full-time work. Still, some writing (and selfishly, I'm excited to end the...
Applied Cartography
Hypermodern Django I've been on the hunt for a new way to dogfood Buttondown for the past month or so, and I've finally...
a month ago
20
a month ago
I've been on the hunt for a new way to dogfood Buttondown for the past month or so, and I've finally found it: Hypermodern Django. At this point, all of my/our usages of Buttondown for Buttondown don't involve archives: we're using it headlessly, with RSS-to-email and APIs...
Applied Cartography
Letters to a Young Bartender Every straight white male is forced, character-creation-screen-style, to choose one overtly...
a month ago
20
a month ago
Every straight white male is forced, character-creation-screen-style, to choose one overtly consumptive hobby that in some small part defines their twenties and – God willing — their enduring adulthood. Some choose sourdough; many choose barbecue; I chose mixology. (A...
Applied Cartography
Truncating timedeltas in Django Consider a fan-out-ish model that you want to aggregate a bunch of: likes on a post, for...
2 weeks ago
20
2 weeks ago
Consider a fan-out-ish model that you want to aggregate a bunch of: likes on a post, for instance. class Post(models.Model): created_at = models.DateTimeField() class Event(models.Model): post = models.ForeignKey(Post, on_delete=models.CASCADE) created_at =...
Applied Cartography
Hidden settings are for cowards At Stripe, we had two abstractions for branching logic in production: flags, which were meant to be...
a month ago
20
a month ago
At Stripe, we had two abstractions for branching logic in production: flags, which were meant to be explicitly temporal (temporarily split-testing traffic; rolling out a new feature or code path; exposing a specific path for a cohort of users during a closed beta) and gates,...
Applied Cartography
Bluesky is good Three months ago, I wrote Bluesky et al, in which I walked through the various platforms vying for...
a month ago
19
a month ago
Three months ago, I wrote Bluesky et al, in which I walked through the various platforms vying for the dubious title of "Twitter's successor" and landed on Bluesky as being my favorite, perhaps less out of its ostensible inherent virtues and more out of the size of its...
Applied Cartography
Shipping is capturing value This great essay from Sean Goedecke went viral two weeks ago, drawing fury and fervor alike for a...
2 months ago
19
2 months ago
This great essay from Sean Goedecke went viral two weeks ago, drawing fury and fervor alike for a Moral Mazes-esque analysis of how engineers at large companies should think about shipping: Shipping is a social construct within a company. Concretely, that means that a project is...
Applied Cartography
Klarna: nineteen years, twenty billion kroner I tend to ignore the entire genre of what we now refer to as BNPL businesses — Affirm, Afterpay...
2 months ago
18
2 months ago
I tend to ignore the entire genre of what we now refer to as BNPL businesses — Affirm, Afterpay (RIP), Klarna, et al — not for any particular sin I feel that they are committing, but because they in my mind are much less interesting companies with less volatile upside than the...
Applied Cartography
A good H1 Buttondown was kindly featured in H1 Gallery last week, and Ryan asked me to opine a bit on how we...
2 months ago
17
2 months ago
Buttondown was kindly featured in H1 Gallery last week, and Ryan asked me to opine a bit on how we arrived at our current iteration, which is the anodyne yet pointed Email for you. Yes, you. Historically, we've called Buttondown a 'newsletter tool' — the h1 before this was 'The...
Applied Cartography
Bozos Kevin Twohy has a list of heuristics for new projects/clients, and my favorite is simple: No Bozos....
3 months ago
16
3 months ago
Kevin Twohy has a list of heuristics for new projects/clients, and my favorite is simple: No Bozos. Simple policy. No exceptions. You know it when you see it. Every founder has a story about the time that they ignored the red flags and bent over backwards for a particularly...
Applied Cartography
Notes on Zed, revisited A little over six months ago, I wrote Notes on Zed. My conclusion at that time was that Zed made a...
3 months ago
15
3 months ago
A little over six months ago, I wrote Notes on Zed. My conclusion at that time was that Zed made a lot of great choices and felt really good to use, but lacked parity with VS Code's feature/ecosystem to its detriment. Six months later, I spent a few days using it as my daily...
Applied Cartography
Fathom I'd been meaning to jot down some thoughts on Fathom for a while, and did not have a particularly...
a month ago
15
a month ago
I'd been meaning to jot down some thoughts on Fathom for a while, and did not have a particularly good reason to do so until the news broke that Paul Jarvis was selling his share of the company to Jack Ellis, the technical co-founder. [1] Anyway, the two thoughts: I think Fathom...
Applied Cartography
Migrating to Django 5 The total LOC delta to migrate Buttondown from Django 4 to Django 5 was +143, -150. (I was...
3 months ago
14
3 months ago
The total LOC delta to migrate Buttondown from Django 4 to Django 5 was +143, -150. (I was incentivized to do so because our search right now is quite slow, and the lowest hanging piece of fruit is to move some of the tsvector generation out of band, and I'd rather do that using...
Applied Cartography
Applied Cartography × Val Town Had a blast live-coding some experimentations with Steve and Shovel yesterday using Val Town. (If...
2 months ago
14
2 months ago
Had a blast live-coding some experimentations with Steve and Shovel yesterday using Val Town. (If you haven't used Val, well, watch the stream — think live, zero-deploy code snippets that can be arbitrarily extended and executed.) Reflecting on the experience, the most exciting...
Applied Cartography
Notebook as marketing primitive Earlier this week, I stumbled upon this brilliant marketing-slash-documentation idea from...
3 months ago
14
3 months ago
Earlier this week, I stumbled upon this brilliant marketing-slash-documentation idea from SingleStore — notebooks as a first-party page! There are a handful of nice things about this idea: Very easy to fan out. You're not going to really run out of sample notebooks from which you...
Applied Cartography
Projects are things with steps Lots of kind words poured in as a response to My approach to GTD and PKM, and one question was asked...
3 months ago
14
3 months ago
Lots of kind words poured in as a response to My approach to GTD and PKM, and one question was asked so frequently that I decided to write about it. Why is “Get mom a birthday present” a project and not a task? GTD is very orthodox in what a “project” is: it’s anything that: you...
Applied Cartography
Talking to customers You say that these numbers mean dial it down. I say they mean dial it up. You haven't gotten...
3 months ago
13
3 months ago
You say that these numbers mean dial it down. I say they mean dial it up. You haven't gotten through. There are people you haven't persuaded yet. These number mean dial it up. Otherwise you're like the French radical, watching the crowd run by and saying, "There go my people. I...
Applied Cartography
Consider the data product The advice might seem dated these days, but I think the stair step approach to bootstrapping is...
3 months ago
13
3 months ago
The advice might seem dated these days, but I think the stair step approach to bootstrapping is evergreen: It’s much easier to sell an add-on to an existing ecosystem like a WordPress plugin, a Shopify app, a Heroku add-on – they’re usually small things to build, relatively...
Applied Cartography
Applied Cartography × People & Blogs There are few pleasures greater than getting to be profiled for an interview series that you've been...
3 months ago
12
3 months ago
There are few pleasures greater than getting to be profiled for an interview series that you've been reading for months, and last week I got to do exactly that. To browse Manu's site — not just this interview series — feels a bit like walking on a quiet beach in autumn: there's a...
Applied Cartography
Two weeks of parenthood We've had Lucy for two weeks, which qualifies us as experts, which means it is time to write about...
3 months ago
12
3 months ago
We've had Lucy for two weeks, which qualifies us as experts, which means it is time to write about parenthood. (In all seriousness, consider the below descriptive and not prescriptive: mostly, it's a notepad filled with things that were remarkable or surprising or divergent from...
Applied Cartography
Applied Cartography × Indie Rails Chatted with Jess and Jeremy about a whole slew of things, from pricing strategy to terrifying and...
4 months ago
12
4 months ago
Chatted with Jess and Jeremy about a whole slew of things, from pricing strategy to terrifying and arcane differences between various Markdown parsers (including why I hate Slack.) They were particularly kind and gracious given that the amount of production-quality Rails I've...
Applied Cartography
VC does not guarantee PMF Two companies that I started following (with no small amount of envy) back in 2021: Hype (fka Pico)...
3 months ago
12
3 months ago
Two companies that I started following (with no small amount of envy) back in 2021: Hype (fka Pico) sold to an MMA-themed holdco earlier this year. Raised a $4.5m seed from Stripe and Bloomberg Beta and a $10m Series A; crossed the finish line at $200K ARR after eight years. Stir...
Applied Cartography
Meta's two assets (Epistemic disclaimer: there are few Extremely Big Tech Companies to whom I feel apathy more vividly...
3 months ago
12
3 months ago
(Epistemic disclaimer: there are few Extremely Big Tech Companies to whom I feel apathy more vividly than Meta. I had a Facebook account in high school and college and got rid of it at some point post-graduation, though I'd be hard-pressed to tell you when exactly that was.) It...
Applied Cartography
My approach to GTD and PKM One pernicious thing with writing about productivity and knowledge systems: you only change systems...
3 months ago
11
3 months ago
One pernicious thing with writing about productivity and knowledge systems: you only change systems that aren’t working, and you tend to write about things during times of change. So most writing about productivity systems stem from people whose systems have failed them. It is...
Applied Cartography
Mass renaming files in fish on macOS One of many two-liners to come as I migrate things from the old site onto Obsidian: brew install...
a year ago
11
a year ago
One of many two-liners to come as I migrate things from the old site onto Obsidian: brew install rename rename "s/.mdx/.md/" **.md
Applied Cartography
October, 2024 Hello! Lots of writing in October (what early parenthood takes away in terms of deep flow, it gives...
3 months ago
10
3 months ago
Hello! Lots of writing in October (what early parenthood takes away in terms of deep flow, it gives back in terms of twenty-minute pockets of time and thought): On the content front, I wrote about Monster Sanctuary (a delightful JRPG), The Anderson Tapes (a solid late-period Sean...
Applied Cartography
You should build this: A prior iteration of this site had a page called "Project ideas" that listed a bunch of things that...
3 months ago
10
3 months ago
A prior iteration of this site had a page called "Project ideas" that listed a bunch of things that I'd like to build. This was a good idea and useful in its own right (I got a few people to build companies and projects based on them, and it was a useful avenue by which folks...
Applied Cartography
Gosling’s Old Rum Virginia has draconian liquor laws, which means I have to get interesting bottles shipped from...
12 months ago
10
12 months ago
Virginia has draconian liquor laws, which means I have to get interesting bottles shipped from [REDACTED], a site on which I am very prone to judging a book by its cover; every month I'll end up purchasing a bottle of something purely because it looks interesting and I can...
Applied Cartography
Use Rails I have a good number of people ask me what software stack they should use. I always have a two-part...
9 months ago
10
9 months ago
I have a good number of people ask me what software stack they should use. I always have a two-part answer: Use what you're familiar with. If there's something that you've spent a good amount of time using, stick with that one. Rails. People are usually surprised when I say this...
Applied Cartography
How Buttondown uses HAProxy There are few technical decisions I regret more with Buttondown than the decision to combine the...
5 months ago
10
5 months ago
There are few technical decisions I regret more with Buttondown than the decision to combine the author-facing app, the subscriber-facing app, and the marketing site all under a single domain. Most technical decisions are reversible with sufficient grit and dedication; this one...
Applied Cartography
Buttondown Analytics 3.0 Working on a new analytics engine — a scant eleven months after the previous 'new analytics...
11 months ago
10
11 months ago
Working on a new analytics engine — a scant eleven months after the previous 'new analytics engine'. Calling this 3.0 is a bit of a misnomer: most of the code, design, and plumbing from the 2023 redesign is sticking around, just in a more modular format. The goal here is to...
Applied Cartography
Globals in Histoire Histoire, like so many other tools in the Vue ecosystem, is a bit of a neglected younger sibling to...
10 months ago
9
10 months ago
Histoire, like so many other tools in the Vue ecosystem, is a bit of a neglected younger sibling to Storybook — a little bit uglier, with worse documentation and a couple rough edges, but much more tightly integrated with Vue and Vite. [1] One thing that was not particularly...
Applied Cartography
Notes on buttondown.com We spent $85,000 for buttondown.com in April; this was the biggest capital expenditure I've ever...
5 months ago
9
5 months ago
We spent $85,000 for buttondown.com in April; this was the biggest capital expenditure I've ever made, and though it was coming from cash flow generated by Buttondown rather than my own checking account it was by rough estimation the largest non-house purchase I've ever made. As...
Applied Cartography
Finding null JSON values in Postgres Postgres' JSONB functionality is fast and useful but when I find myself dropping down from the...
9 months ago
9
9 months ago
Postgres' JSONB functionality is fast and useful but when I find myself dropping down from the Django ORM into SQL to do weird things, the syntax strikes me as confusing and arcane. As such, when I need to do esoteric things it takes me longer time than I'd like, and in hopes...
Applied Cartography
Against Against Innovation Tokens Glyph (whose writing and contributions to the Python ecosystem I am deeply grateful for) wrote...
7 months ago
9
7 months ago
Glyph (whose writing and contributions to the Python ecosystem I am deeply grateful for) wrote Against Innovation Tokens yesterday: In 2015, Dan McKinley laid out a model for software teams selecting technologies. He proposed that each team have a limited supply of “innovation...
Applied Cartography
Using Cursor to port Django tests to pytest When it comes to AI tooling, I am equal parts optimist and cynic. I have no moral qualm with using...
5 months ago
9
5 months ago
When it comes to AI tooling, I am equal parts optimist and cynic. I have no moral qualm with using these tools (Supermaven is a pretty heavy part of my day-to-day work), but have found most tools quite bad by the metric of "do they make me more productive on Buttondown's code...
Applied Cartography
Notes on Zed I was late to the VS Code zeitgeist, and as penitence I try to go out of my way to try new editors...
10 months ago
9
10 months ago
I was late to the VS Code zeitgeist, and as penitence I try to go out of my way to try new editors whenever I see them — which is why this morning I installed Zed, which makes its bones on performance (yay!) and teams functionality (irrelevant for my use cases, but seems...
Applied Cartography
Are monopolies bad, actually? One of the more interesting theses advanced by Zero to One [1] is that monopolies are good to the...
10 months ago
8
10 months ago
One of the more interesting theses advanced by Zero to One [1] is that monopolies are good to the extent that they afford companies the agency and comfort to engage in long-term activities: Monopolists can think about things other than making money; non-monopolists can’t. In...
Applied Cartography
Keeping a technical edge Someone emailed me in response to Two years as an independent technologist, in which I wrote: I miss...
5 months ago
8
5 months ago
Someone emailed me in response to Two years as an independent technologist, in which I wrote: I miss of being at a large company, which is dealing with deeply cutting-edge technical problems, but my ability to analyze information, make decisions, and perform at a high-level has...
Applied Cartography
Content debt There’s a nascent trend of releasing ostensibly-private material (changelogs, public wikis,...
6 months ago
8
6 months ago
There’s a nascent trend of releasing ostensibly-private material (changelogs, public wikis, handbooks, etc.) to the public as a bit of a marketing push. This is essentially a form of debt, to the extent that you’re taking a lump-sum payment now in exchange for the implicit cost...
Applied Cartography
PSA: mess around with Keystatic We've been using Keystatic in Buttondown for around six months now: we migrated most of the content...
10 months ago
8
10 months ago
We've been using Keystatic in Buttondown for around six months now: we migrated most of the content on the marketing site (which is backed by Next) from MDX onto Keystatic, and were so happy with the experience that the upcoming rebuild of the docs site will be featuring...
Applied Cartography
Grace notes I'm not loving Unreasonable Hospitality, but it did supply me with a phrase that I've been looking...
8 months ago
8
8 months ago
I'm not loving Unreasonable Hospitality, but it did supply me with a phrase that I've been looking for: Eventually, that gesture became one of our steps of service. The host would ask guests, “How’d you get here tonight?” If they responded, “Oh, we drove,” he’d follow up with,...
Applied Cartography
You gotta be able to taste the kool-aid Cognition, a six-month-old startup in the AI coding space just raised $175m at a $2b...
9 months ago
8
9 months ago
Cognition, a six-month-old startup in the AI coding space just raised $175m at a $2b valuation: Despite the skepticism surrounding Devin’s launch, the AI coding assistant has shown promising results. According to the SWE-Bench benchmark, which evaluates AI models on software...
Applied Cartography
Improving Django's default pagination performance Buttondown's API calls are very fast, and one of the reasons why is that we've removed every single...
5 months ago
8
5 months ago
Buttondown's API calls are very fast, and one of the reasons why is that we've removed every single possible database query that we can. The most recent was what looked like a fairly benign COUNT(*) query, coming from the default Django paginator; if you're gonna paginate things,...
Applied Cartography
Git one-liner: get the earliest commit from X hours ago I wanted to get a commit that was temporally some distance back as part of my experimentation with...
8 months ago
7
8 months ago
I wanted to get a commit that was temporally some distance back as part of my experimentation with git cliff. This took some time to do, but here's what I ended up with: git log --since="72 hours ago" --until="now" --reverse --pretty=format:"%h" | head -1 Nothing particularly...
Applied Cartography
Weird test: internal link checking I wrote last month about using weird tests. Here's another example: checking for broken internal...
9 months ago
7
9 months ago
I wrote last month about using weird tests. Here's another example: checking for broken internal links in our upcoming docsite redesign! const extractInternalLinks = (content: string): string[] => { // Check for internal links only, in the form of [text](/path). const...
Applied Cartography
Stripe Sessions 2024 Stripe held the keynote for Sessions, their annual WWDC/re:invent-esque conference, this morning. I...
9 months ago
7
9 months ago
Stripe held the keynote for Sessions, their annual WWDC/re:invent-esque conference, this morning. I wanted to jot down some thoughts while they’re still fresh. (I think the changelog is the best way to poke around both the changes I’m writing about and the ones that I...
Applied Cartography
Incumbency Andrew Rea with an interesting and increasingly familiar take about how AI will disrupt...
6 months ago
7
6 months ago
Andrew Rea with an interesting and increasingly familiar take about how AI will disrupt software-focused private equity: Distribution and brand moats can protect your legacy products for a while (esp in enterprise) but eventually you get lapped by competitors with better...
Applied Cartography
Notes on ActivityPub By far the single most-fruitful tactic has been "just look at raw GET responses from Mastodon and...
8 months ago
7
8 months ago
By far the single most-fruitful tactic has been "just look at raw GET responses from Mastodon and see what things are shaped like." I know that "ActivityPub is under-specified" is a bit of a meme, but it's wild how little prior art there is. Something that gives distinctly bad...
Applied Cartography
Tailwind black magic: styling paragraphs within tables The new version of the Buttondown docs site is all in on Keystatic, Markdoc, and Tailwind's...
10 months ago
7
10 months ago
The new version of the Buttondown docs site is all in on Keystatic, Markdoc, and Tailwind's typography plugin — which makes it really easy to author beautiful docs in plaintext. We ran into one small issue, which is that the Markdoc renderer likes to place paragraph tags in table...
Applied Cartography
Is cool enough? Via HN I ran into not one but two extremely neat and pleasant-looking libraries for URL...
10 months ago
7
10 months ago
Via HN I ran into not one but two extremely neat and pleasant-looking libraries for URL manipulation. They look like great libraries, and a prior version of me would have taken a brief set of cursory glances at the hodgepodge of janky URL manipulation code that I wrote for...
Applied Cartography
Peak Newsletter A handful of folks sent me this quip from Nate Silver a few days ago: Slightly against interest to...
6 months ago
7
6 months ago
A handful of folks sent me this quip from Nate Silver a few days ago: Slightly against interest to admit this (I don't want more competition lol) but I think we're still probably a year or two away from Peak Newsletter. It's just a really good distribution mechanism for certain...
Applied Cartography
MD5-based uniqueness constraints in Django Yesterday, I was trying to set a unique constraint for comments in Buttondown to prevent accidental...
5 months ago
7
5 months ago
Yesterday, I was trying to set a unique constraint for comments in Buttondown to prevent accidental double-commenting, and I ran into a problem that I hadn't seen before: index row size 2816 exceeds btree version 4 maximum 2704 for index...
Applied Cartography
You need to be frictionlog-maxxing Lots of people have spent the past few days discussing the perceived increase in difficulty in...
9 months ago
7
9 months ago
Lots of people have spent the past few days discussing the perceived increase in difficulty in getting an entry-level programming job relative to the halcyon ZIRP days of yesteryear. I am sympathetic to new grads running into this; I am dismayed that when I ask some [1] of them...
Applied Cartography
PSA: mess around with Kolo I had bookmarked Kolo many months ago to try out and finally got a chance to integrate it with...
11 months ago
7
11 months ago
I had bookmarked Kolo many months ago to try out and finally got a chance to integrate it with Buttondown — a process that I expected to take a couple hours on a lazy Sunday and in fact took ten minutes and three lines of code. If you have a Django app, I think you should drop...
Applied Cartography
Pytest: test for print statements Inspired by Adam Johnson's test for pending migrations, and of course in conversation with my own...
7 months ago
7
7 months ago
Inspired by Adam Johnson's test for pending migrations, and of course in conversation with my own love of weird tests, I offer a similar concept: a test for finding stray print statements in your codebase, with a ratchet array for stuff to ignore. import glob PATH =...
Applied Cartography
Typesafe routes in Vue I watched Gary Bernhardt's talk on static routing back a few years ago and — I'm not sure if I would...
7 months ago
7
7 months ago
I watched Gary Bernhardt's talk on static routing back a few years ago and — I'm not sure if I would call it formative, but it stuck in my craw as a platonic ideal of sorts, as something I couldn't really justify adopting within Buttondown but really wanted. I built out and...
Applied Cartography
Notes from May Lots of writing this month: Why you should use Rails A reminder that things take time How...
8 months ago
7
8 months ago
Lots of writing this month: Why you should use Rails A reminder that things take time How shadcn/ui's previews work Why I hate that 1.01% meme A lovely term, 'grace note' Au revoir, invoke! A quick check-in on 11ty A rant/snippet for auth.js The first edition of what will be a...
Applied Cartography
Why your marketing site should be separate In Notes on buttondown.com and How Buttondown uses HAProxy, I outlined the slightly kludgy way we...
4 months ago
7
4 months ago
In Notes on buttondown.com and How Buttondown uses HAProxy, I outlined the slightly kludgy way we serve buttondown.com both as a marketing site (public-facing, Next/Vercel, largely just content pushed by non-developers) and an author-facing app (behind a login, Django/Heroku/Vue)...
Applied Cartography
Au revoir, Invoke It's not quite interesting or noteworthy enough to warrant a full-on essay, but yesterday we...
8 months ago
7
8 months ago
It's not quite interesting or noteworthy enough to warrant a full-on essay, but yesterday we unshipped the last remaining Invoke commands and ported them over to just. I think Invoke is a good, cool project, and I wish it well. If you're at the precise intersection of "you have...
Applied Cartography
Vibes and years XH asks: How do indie developers/small teams keep track of and prioritize long-term roadmaps? I've...
11 months ago
7
11 months ago
XH asks: How do indie developers/small teams keep track of and prioritize long-term roadmaps? I've been basically work off my gut + Feeling of the Day for the past few years, and that's getting a bit unsustainable Buttondown's roadmapping has existed for the past three years in a...
Applied Cartography
Auth.js + Square Internal tools and small, well-scoped projects are a great avenue to tinker with technologies on the...
8 months ago
6
8 months ago
Internal tools and small, well-scoped projects are a great avenue to tinker with technologies on the periphery of your understanding, and a Third South project has led me to spin up a small Next project using Bun [1] and Auth.js (nee next-auth), which has been quite bad and I...
Applied Cartography
Always use an enum for your status field When I was first starting my career at Amazon — even more bright-eyed and rosy-cheeked than I am now...
4 months ago
6
4 months ago
When I was first starting my career at Amazon — even more bright-eyed and rosy-cheeked than I am now — I was thrilled by the concept of an "architecture review", and by extension the concept of a "Principal Engineer" (Amazon's term for a staff-level engineer, someone beyond...
Applied Cartography
The taste of beer Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity. There’s a...
8 months ago
6
8 months ago
Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity. There’s a relatively famous line from Bezos, circulated first at YC in ’08 and then more recently by the folks at Acquired (a great pod!): Jeff uses this analogy for AWS. He talks about...
Applied Cartography
Things take time Things take time. Nintendo fairly famously was born in 1889, and the modern incarnation — Yamamuchi...
9 months ago
6
9 months ago
Things take time. Nintendo fairly famously was born in 1889, and the modern incarnation — Yamamuchi Nintendo & Co., LTD — was established nearly fifty years later, in 1933. They spent forty years selling playing cards, then another decade operating merely as a distributor of...
Applied Cartography
Why should a company? For a long time, my goal with Buttondown was largely around failure avoidance: "I want to get my...
10 months ago
6
10 months ago
For a long time, my goal with Buttondown was largely around failure avoidance: "I want to get my first paying customer so I know it's not a fake product"; "I want to hit a thousand dollars in revenue so I know it's not just friends humoring me"; "I want to make $10K/mo or else I...
Applied Cartography
11ty .njk as the default templating language is an odd choice, and I find myself stubbing my toe on it a...
11 months ago
6
11 months ago
.njk as the default templating language is an odd choice, and I find myself stubbing my toe on it a good amount. Maybe that's a me thing! It is extremely fast. This site has around 2300 pages; Eleventy is compiling it in around two seconds. The extensibility ergonomics are...
Applied Cartography
Notes from April Welcome to spring, bona fide and humid. Lots of writing this month: I wrote about spending the past...
9 months ago
6
9 months ago
Welcome to spring, bona fide and humid. Lots of writing this month: I wrote about spending the past two years as an independent technologist. On the media side of things: brief words on Murderville (meh), The Parallax View (incredible), This is Personal (meh), Cribsheet...
Applied Cartography
You should use Helpscout Was digging through old issues of the personal site and found this draft snippet: I was evaluating...
11 months ago
5
11 months ago
Was digging through old issues of the personal site and found this draft snippet: I was evaluating HelpScout as a potential first step in a series of many, many steps to onboard a dedicated support engineer for Buttondown, and it turns out that the process of adding custom...
Applied Cartography
Migrating someone who's on Stripe Connect Express Most Stripe accounts on Substack are “Standard Connect”, which essentially means that: the author...
a year ago
5
a year ago
Most Stripe accounts on Substack are “Standard Connect”, which essentially means that: the author has full agency over their account and is the merchant of record; they can revoke OAuth access from Substack (or whomever) at any time; Substack continues to take that 10% as an...
Applied Cartography
Tailwind black magic: swallowing all pointer events I wrote two days ago about a real and useful application of Tailwind black magic; here's...
10 months ago
5
10 months ago
I wrote two days ago about a real and useful application of Tailwind black magic; here's another. Buttondown has a dropzone component lets folks drag-and-drop items or click on it to get a file-picker. It's used for importing images, archives, CSVs, the works: because it's so...
Applied Cartography
Postgres batch enqueuing in ten lines of Django It hasn't failed me yet: BATCH_SIZE = 100 def batch_proess(queryset) -> None: count =...
a year ago
5
a year ago
It hasn't failed me yet: BATCH_SIZE = 100 def batch_proess(queryset) -> None: count = queryset.count() if count == 0: time.sleep(10) return with transaction.atomic(): batch = list( queryset.select_for_update(of=("self",),...
Applied Cartography
44% If you spend enough time digesting hackneyed business or self-improvement advice, you've probably...
8 months ago
5
8 months ago
If you spend enough time digesting hackneyed business or self-improvement advice, you've probably seen someone wax poetic about the following image: This is meant to be an illustration of the power of incrementalism (often referred to as kaizen when the writer is trying to be...
Applied Cartography
How shadcn/ui examples work I’m increasingly convinced that for developer-first tools, a really good docs experience is a...
8 months ago
5
8 months ago
I’m increasingly convinced that for developer-first tools, a really good docs experience is a durable, non-trivial advantage. Part of this thesis is that Really Good Docs Experiences, in addition to having great information architecture and strong writing/prose, should be thought...
Applied Cartography
Why can't you just...? Buried in a snarky thread about why Google Calendar doesn’t support calendar syncing is a long,...
8 months ago
5
8 months ago
Buried in a snarky thread about why Google Calendar doesn’t support calendar syncing is a long, detailed explanation of why shipping this sort of thing is hard: Designing a consent experience for the enterprise admin and enterprise end user Creating a special "read only" object...
Applied Cartography
What's in a name Guillermo posted this recently: What you name your product matters more than people give it credit....
2 days ago
5
2 days ago
Guillermo posted this recently: What you name your product matters more than people give it credit. It's your first and most universal UI to the world. Designing a good name requires multi-dimensional thinking and is full of edge cases, much like designing software. I first will...
Applied Cartography
Notes on 'Founder Mode' / Lieutenancy In Paul Graham’s latest essay, he writes: The theme of Brian's talk was that the conventional wisdom...
5 months ago
5
5 months ago
In Paul Graham’s latest essay, he writes: The theme of Brian's talk was that the conventional wisdom about how to run larger companies is mistaken. As Airbnb grew, well-meaning people advised him that he had to run the company in a certain way for it to scale. Their advice could...