The half-built thing
The half-built thing is the most useful object in any creative pursuit. It has enough shape to react against. It tells you the parts you didn’t think through. It is the cheapest version of the future-you that has...
Quiet writing about software, craft, and the long arc of building things.
A small writing project. Started one quiet morning, kept up most days. Essays, notes, and the occasional book report.
More writing
A note on slow tools
Some of the tools I use most are slow — and the slowness is the feature. A typewriter forces you to plan a sentence....
Reading: The Wages of Destruction
Adam Tooze’s economic history of Nazi Germany is the rare 700-page book where every chapter earns its weight. The argument I keep coming back...
Tools I want to stop using
I keep a quiet list of tools I’m sad to depend on, in order of how badly I’d like to escape. Today’s top three:...
On writing CSS in 2026
I’ve been writing CSS since float-based layouts, and the current era is the kindest one yet. Container queries, subgrid, color-mix, :has() — the language...
The case for fewer dependencies
Most of the slowness in modern web stacks isn’t the database or the network — it’s the JavaScript bundle the build pipeline accidentally invited...