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...
Archive
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. A film...
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 to: regimes...
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: Image-resizing services...
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 can do...
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 in. Three...