Blog Posts

How to Thought Lead (2026)

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.

The Craft Doesn't Leave You

One of the quieter struggles of leading engineering teams is that the time to practice the craft shrinks. You're in meetings. You're reviewing designs. You're hiring, mentoring, unblocking. When you get home, there's family. The long, uninterrupted sessions you had earlier in

Hot Pockets Pro Max

Ep #235 Hot Pockets Pro Max (presented by Warp) Robbie and I chat OpenClaw, token optimizations, liberating data from walled gardens, burn windows, and of course some whiskey and some whatnot. ⤷ whiskey.fm · youtube · spotify · apple

Links, March 2026

Footer.design Website of Haley Park - What a soulful corner of the internet! Locale - Preview local fonts, by Josh Puckett How to Manufacture Luck Friendship - Essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1841)

Fear, Growth, and Leadership: Year Two on the Mountain with My Kid

A year ago, I wrote about skiing with my 9-year-old (now 10) and how the experience mirrored so much of what I see in the workplace. The fearless kid. The cautious adult. The tension between "just go" and "learn the basics first." A year later, the

View Transitions can swoop‽

Like Zoolander who can't turn right, I thought View Transitions couldn't swoop. I had been under the impression that they couldn't curve towards the destination, and it was one of those things that you like can't unsee. All view transitions going in straight lines… CodePen All my prior attempts had failed, til now. The way of the swoop # When you give something a view-transition-name like: #ball1 { view-transition-name: view-tra

Making art with CSS gradients and corner-shape and skew, oh my

I combined some fun CSS techniques to make a little diving board drawing!

WWW Ep234 Pay No Attention To The Llm Behind The Terminal With Zach Lloyd Of Warp

Ep #234 Pay No Attention to the LLM Behind the Terminal with Zach Lloyd of Warp Robbie and I chat latest agentic workflows with the CEO of Warp, digging into our favorite features, cloud agents with Oz, some delicious smokey whiskey and some whatnot. ⤷ whiskey.fm · youtube · spotify · apple

Claude is an Electron App because we’ve lost native

Article argues that Claude is not an Electron app not because LLMs can’t do it, but because there are no advantages left for native

Things Openclaw Is Making Me

Hello personal software: A Shopify store (TBA) Beer tracker Whiskey tracker My own guitar songbood My own banjo songbook Birthday tracker

My OpenClaw Token Dashboard

First off, I call my OpenClaw assistant "Punk Ass," short for "Punk Assistant." It's been great so far having a punk ass for various projects. I hadn't been using my gaming machine much; now it's a work horse. But, when you're running an AI assistant that handles Discord messages, cron jobs, and various projects; costs add up. But where exactly? I directed a simple dashboard to find out. How It Works # OpenClaw stores session logs as JSONL

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CSS Scroll Driven Gyro Trig Experiments

scroll-driven geometric orbit experiments Triangles Atomic Squares Orbits Featuring billboarding, center of mass pivoting, and CSS trig functions.

WWW Ep233 Humans Are Now Legacy Dependencies

Ep #233 Humans Are Now Legacy Dependencies Robbie and I chat agentic workflows, OpenClaw, Pi, malleable software, some whiskey and some whatnot. ⤷ whiskey.fm · youtube · spotify · apple

Constance Crozier: Forecasting s-curves is hard

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 how YOU, YOU DUMB DUMB, DONT UNDERSTAND EXPONENTIALS LET ME EXPLAIN. and then as things hit invisible asymptotes those same loud voices who write viral essays have curiously moved on to other things.

Sprites on the Web

In game development, it’s common to use spritesheets for animation, but this technique isn’t as widely used on the web these days. Which is a shame, because we can do some pretty cool stuff with sprites! In this post, we’ll share the niche CSS function you can use to leverage this technique, and explore some of the potential use cases.

on finding love

I don’t like the usual discourse about dating and how you’re meant to optimize for it. So here are some thoughts on what love actually is and how you find it.

How passkeys work

If you're not sure about the ins and outs of passkeys, here's a little primer.

WWW Ep232 No Ralph Wiggum No Training Wheels Just Agents

Ep #232 No Ralph Wiggum. No Training Wheels. Just Agents. do Ralph Wiggum loops automatically produce better results? is context pollution killing productivity? the rise and fall of MCP servers and skills why vanilla Claude might be the only tool you actually need CSS anchor positioning failures Stranger Things hot takes why small distilleries are just like indie startups ⤷ whiskey.fm · youtube · spotify · apple

I am making videos again!

Catch me on YouTube and Twitch, y'all.

Take a hard game, and make it shorter

You are of course aware that attention spans are shrinking. YouTube -> Shorts, Instagram Reels, Tiktoks, etc have taken over the world.

How I Reverse-Engineered a Home Assistant Integration for the Homewerks Smart Bathroom Fan

I love my Homewerks 7148-01-AX bathroom fan. It’s got Alexa built in, Bluetooth speakers, an LED light with adjustable brightness and color temperature, and a surprisingly capable exhaust fan — all controlled from a sleek wall panel. For a bathroom fan, it punches way above its weight.

WWW 231 We Stopped Coding By Hand

Ep #231 We stopped coding by hand because agentic AI is too good Robbie and Chuck dig into agentic AI loops, the rise of prompt-driven development, whether coding by hand is officially dead, and what happens when tools like OpenCode and Claude become the new normal. ⤷ whiskey.fm · youtube · spotify · apple

Walking in the Rain

A collection of threads to pull on Walking exercises the mind as well as the body. 12 kilometers across 2.5 hours. Golden Gate Park. My first time seeing the California Academy of Sciences. Walking, galloping, strolling, waltzing. A cliché I often return to: to be known is to be

Tokyo Design Forum

Working notes on Tokyo Design Forum - Feb 16-18, 2026 Links Japan Field Guide - Tokyo Feb 2026 TODO TeamLab

Site Updates Feb 2026

Site Updates New persona filtering on desktop Deno KV social data caching new Codepen 2.0 editor support UI fixes Notebook update (added Color Picker) Server analytics added to Notebook Server page views and active users integrated into UI

Scaley Mask Image Hover

img:hover { scale: 1.2; clip-path: inset(10% round 20px); } nice, n' simple (codepen)

WWW Ep230 We Accidentally Deleted Programming

Ep #230 We accidentally deleted programming Robbie and I dig into the shift from code-first to spec-first development, whether TypeScript still matters in an AI-driven world, the rise of agency over specialization, and why the future might belong to prompt-driven tinkerers instead of traditional developers. ⤷ whiskey.fm · youtube · spotify · apple

Links, Feburary 2026

Working notes ui.sh - Toolkit for coding agents to build better UIs Tool UI - UI components for AI interfaces Unified diff viewer - Opinionated simple diff viewer for React Conductor - Orchestrate coding agents on Mac Japan Field Guide - Tokyo Guide by Will Apprenticeship Pattern

Quotes

"Many pleasures of life come from contemplation that improves with age. Every smaller pleasure is compounded by wisdom. Pleasures begin with the senses, but they dwell the longest in contemplation. Optimism and faith and imagination tend to arrive together. The pessimist is an un

Design Engineering Syllabus

Working notes. See Design Engineering for more links & resources. Design Systems Building a Design System from scratch, Maxime Heckel (2022) design-system (Maxime's open source personal design system) Bootstrapping a UI component library, Nicolás Bevacqua (2021) Shaders Shades of

Improving my newsletter's open rate the hard(er) way

Turns out just asking for help gets you help? Who knew? Here's how I increased my newsletter open rate.

January 2026

In for 2026: rootedness, running & reflection We ended 2025 with crab roe noodles and red bean tofu pudding. No midnight count down, but it was a moment to pause and take stock of the past year. 2025 was filled with unexpected blessings, twists and turns. SC and I were discussing

Making interesting borders with CSS corner-shape

You can make cool beveled, rounded, notched, scooped, and elliptical borders with the new CSS corner-shape property!

An App for Modern Collage

Last month, I wrote about starting a business. In that post, I mentioned the first product I was building was an iOS app for collage. That app is called Pezzos. It’s a fun way to make, share, and explore digital collages. It’ll be available sooner than later. When Can I Use It? I’m racing to get the app ready for first users as soon as possible. As long as nothing goes too sideways and I can keep myself on task, I’ll start inviting people to a limited pre-release build a

The Value of Things

One of the reasons I write is to help me organize my own mind. I have a compulsive need to figure things out and I’ll lay awake at night shuffling sentences around in my head until it hangs together. Then I just have to try to get it all down in Markdown before it dissolves back into chaos. Like a lot of people these days, I am losing a lot of sleep over LLMs and generative AI. I mean that literally. I’ve had nights where I tossed and turned worrying about whether AI is going to dest

Remaking the Linux "touch" command in PowerShell

Context switching between terminals can be a mental lift, and this function to add touch to PowerShell has helped me a bunch!

Tag: PHIL451A

Course notes for PHIL451A: Philsophy of Mind taught by Prof. Evan Thompson at UBC. All content sourced from slides or course materials are cited as such.

Pattern

A pattern in my own pattern language. These represent atomic concepts and observations that appear and reappear within my thinking and work. See the note on 'A Pattern Language' for more information

Sapling

Saplings are single nodes or thoughts. These are generally topics I've spent a decent number of hours thinking about and contain substantial original thought.

Writing

A small collection of some of the writing I've been experimenting with. These are mostly unpolished experiments with fiction and poetry that I've been playing around with. I leave these to you as gifts.

Evergreen

These are notes that are always relevant and constantly being updated and grown throughout the year.

Personal

Personal reflections and musings about my life. I really like to write feelings down as a way to process them and sometimes they take the form of blogposts like these.

Seed

I tend to generally bookmark things for later then revisit them when I have time. These are collections of notes on articles, books, and readings. They are the seeds that form the basis of my ideas and thoughts.

Fruit

Of course, a knowledge index isn’t much use if it doesn’t inform future thinking and output. Fruits are what I like to call derivative or ’new’ pieces of content. This is new work created from saplings, mostly longer form essays, projects, etc. At this stage, thoughts and ideas have matured enough to be able to share and collaborate.

Rhizome

My independent research practice focused on data-neutrality.

Technical

Notes and blog posts on technical subjects. Though there are a lot of technical notes in this garden, these ones are generally ready for public consumption.

A fun trick for getting discovered by LLMs and AI tools

After learning that people were finding my content via LLMs, I tried using said LLMs to make them find me even more often!

Code Wave Build Log

I made a game called Code Wave for the GitHub Game Off 2025, here's how I did it!

Appreciating Mary Cassatt now that I am a mom

I've always loved Cassatt's art, but it hits differently now that I have kids of my own.

Podcast: На Маке нет никаких шкафов @ Думаем дальше

С Ильей Бирманом провожаем Алана Дая, вспоминая, в чём состоят достижения Мака, Джобса и ХИГа (но и Винду добрым словом тоже вспоминаем).

Is the C.R.E.A.T.E. Framework Useful or Just AI Snake Oil?

Frameworks for prompting AI show up constantly. Most promise better results, clearer outputs or some hidden edge. The C.R.E.A.T.E. framework often gets lumped into that category, which raises a fair question. Does it actually matter, or is it just branding around common sense?

The role of design software

Design software shouldn’t be the source of truth—it’s just a tool for exploring the right direction.

React Custom Hooks

Custom hooks are just functions that use hooks. Here's why they matter and when to use them.

It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons

Looking at the first principles of icon design—and how Apple failed to apply all of them in macOS Tahoe

useEffectEvent은 흑마법일까? 그리고 또 한번의 자동화

useEffectEvent가 Stale Closure를 해결하는 원리를 React 내부 구현과 함께 분석하고, React Compiler의 fire()가 이를 어떻게 자동화하는지 살펴봅니다.

A Few Things to Enjoy #2

These are a few things I enjoyed recently. Maybe you’ll enjoy them too. Personal Business A wonderfully well-written reminder that not everything needs to scale. Not everything needs to be automated to the nth degree. Doing things slowly, by hand, for niche groups of people is always an option. “Personal Business” by Charles Broskoski on Are.na. …how is a tiny software company supposed to compete with huge and well-funded companies? The answer is that you don’t really have to. You just have to

4.5년의 회고 그리고 이직 그리고 올해 회고를 곁들인

리멤버에서의 4.5년을 돌아보며, 테크리드 경험과 성장에 대한 고민, 그리고 이직, 그리고 FEConf 발표와 필름 작업 등 올해의 기억들을 정리해봅니다.

Failing at Using a Local LLM for Vinyl Record Color Extraction

As the title suggests, I tried to switch a project from the OpenAI API to a local LLM running in Ollama, but wasn’t able to make it work due to slowness. It was a fun exercise though. This is what I tried and what I learned. Discogs is where I track my record collection. Wax is a nice UI for it that I’ve been noodling on for years. I built a small ETL for it. It uses the OpenAI API to extract human and machine-readable color, texture, and pattern data out of raw—user-provided—descriptions

Building Latchbolt #1

In my previous post I talked about starting a new company, Latchbolt. This is a quick post about the various services and tools I used to get set up. And the costs involved. First, a list of the services I set up. Details follow. Stripe Atlas: Incorporating and registered agent Mercury: Business checking account and credit card Google Workspace: Email, Drive (leave all the Gemini bullshit off) GitHub: Team plan, one license Notion: Where I put words about things Buttondown: The best email p

Something to Latch Onto

Three weeks is a short amount of time. It’s a tiny amount of time when it’s the total time you spend employed at a job. And it happens to be the exact amount of time I spent at my most recent job. April 2025. A post about a new app landed on my Bluesky via repost from a friend. The app was for something that I’m very into. I used it for a few days. While it was in early stages, it was fun and promising. I immediately thought; “This is something I would love to help build.” After a quick sear

Swift 6.2 lets you write better test names

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Nothing outside

No facts

God is a playwright

Zen coding

Statistics made simple

Announcing a simple statistics library for Clojure web servers

Lexicon

A running log of words and phrases

ELI5

Explain to me like I'm 5 years old

Website Writing Ergonomics

How I chose a content rendering approach that lets me write fast and update often

Fork

How To Podcast

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 - basically the McClusky Curve applied. 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 intervi

Goodbye to an 11-year-old Issue

An old feature request on a repo has me in my feelings!

How to get hired in 2025

A collection of red flags in software engineers' test assignments

The modifier .task() has a hidden feature

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Brand New Layouts with CSS Subgrid

Subgrid allows us to extend a grid template down through the DOM tree, so that deeply-nested elements can participate in the same grid layout. At first glance, I thought this would be a helpful convenience, but it turns out that it’s so much more. Subgrid unlocks exciting new layout possibilities, stuff we couldn’t do until now. ✨

Providing a default value in a String interpolation

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Logo: Clojure+

Clojure+ is a project to improve Clojure stdlib.

Needy programs

We used to use software; now software started to use us

on doing things

It’s easy to get anxious just from scrolling. Too much noise, too many people doing things, showing progress, achievements. It gives the illusion that everyone’s moving fast while you’re just there, watching.

The Impossible Triangle of LLM Infra

another talk I am giving at Mastra's TypeScript AI conf today https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1NnQ3H5Bki3vWRRJdVXoCFJ5dsNKH9QrC-eEQ2Z8olck/edit?usp=sharing

Styling External Links Using :has and an Attribute Selector

No doubt this has been written about before, but I used this approach yesterday and it’s cool so I’m writing about it too. Like any good website, I have a pile of links in the footer of this one. Most of the links are to internal pages. A handful of them are to external sites. It’s never bothered me before that the external links aren’t marked as such. But, in a usual fit of procrastination while writing my previous post, I decided those external links now had to be marked in some way. Each link

Fairweather Ride 2025

For 2025 I set a goal to ride 1,000 miles on my bike. I’ve been biking with some regularity for a little over a decade now. In that time, I’ve never set a yearly mileage goal. Only small monthly goals. Which, before this year, I only hit once. I decided it would be fun to work towards a goal way beyond what I’d ever done. Just to see if I could do it. And, of course, if I’m doing something like this, I’m gonna build a website for it. fig 1. Fairweather Ride 2025 Sid

A Few Things to Enjoy #1

These are a few things I enjoyed recently. Maybe you’ll enjoy them too. Why Fish Don’t Exist Rachel and I visited the best bookshop in Wiscasset, Maine, at the end of September. As usual in a place like that, we wanted to take every book home with us. I was restraining myself. Rachel insisted I get at least one book to go along with her haul. I chose this one at random because of the title and cool cover. The photo doesn’t do it justice. They used a type of gold leaf for the not blue parts. Base

Springs and Bounces in Native CSS

The “linear()” timing function is a game-changer; it allows us to model physics-based motion right in vanilla CSS! That said, there are some limitations and quirks to be aware of. I’ve been experimenting with this API for a while now, and in this post, I’ll share all of the tips and tricks I’ve learned for using it effectively. ✨

subscription culture sucks

When did comfort start coming with a renewal date? Everything you touch wants a subscription, even your bed..

Don't make this mistake with a TaskGroup

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The only Permanent Underclass are the ones who believe it is permanent

performatively run a llm locally

Want to run performatively a LLM on your phone just like me?

I am sorry, but everyone is getting syntax highlighting wrong

Applying human ergonomics and design principles to syntax highlighting

Why a custom ViewModifier is often useless

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Sora update #1

We have been learning quickly from how people are using Sora and taking feedback from users, rightsholders, and other interested groups. We of course spent a lot of time discussing this before launch, but now that we have a product out we can do more than just theorize.We are going to make two changes soon (and many more to come).First, we will give rightsholders more granular control over generation of characters, similar to the opt-in model for likeness but with additional controls.We are hear

Sora 2

We are launching a new app called Sora. This is a combination of a new model called Sora 2, and a new product that makes it easy to create, share, and view videos.This feels to many of us like the “ChatGPT for creativity” moment, and it feels fun and new. There is something great about making it really easy and fast to go from idea to result, and the new social dynamics that emerge.Creativity could be about to go through a Cambrian explosion, and along with it, the quality of art and entertainme

How to hide a view in a screenshot

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The Year in Agents - AI Engineer Paris

I gave a short address for the first AIE Paris conference organized by Koyeb!

Abundant Intelligence

Growth in the use of AI services has been astonishing; we expect it to be even more astonishing going forward.As AI gets smarter, access to AI will be a fundamental driver of the economy, and maybe eventually something we consider a fundamental human right. Almost everyone will want more AI working on their behalf.To be able to deliver what the world needs—for inference compute to run these models, and for training compute to keep making them better and better—we are putting the groundwork in pl

The Big Gotcha With @starting-style

CSS has been on fire lately, with tons of great new features. @starting-style is an interesting one; it allows us to use CSS transitions for enter animations, something previously reserved for CSS keyframe animations. But is the juice worth the squeeze?

i dyed my hair pink because i’m mentally stable

The dye stained the sink, my palms, the edge of the mirror. I watched the pink foam run down the drain and thought: well, this is what stability looks like now.

How to disable Liquid Glass

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Jakub and Szymon

AI has gotten remarkably better in recent years; ChatGPT can do amazing things that we take for granted. This is as it should be, and is the story of human progress. But behind the blinking circle, nicely abstracted away, is the greatest story of human ingenuity I have ever seen. A lot of people have worked unbelievably hard to discover how to build something that most experts thought was impossible on this timeframe, and to build a company to deliver products at massive scale to let people bene