Reading I don’t think you should focus on the failure of others, or even the success of others. What you do need to do—and what is surprisingly hard—is to define success for your own part of the world, and work towards that. Non-monetary success, because again, money lags. I’ve a … | Continue reading
At the beginning of 2023, I released a Figma plugin called Placemark, which lets you create vector maps in Figma, the graphic design tool. Since then I’ve been maintaining that plugin for fun, and introduced another one, Placemark Globe. They’ve been somewhat successful! The Plac … | Continue reading
Busy month! In January, I wrote about the first four Val Town runtimes, and built a lot of features in Val Town. I also hacked around enough to make Placemark Play available again, the “free-as-in-beer” Placemark UI. It still has some warts, but it’s there. Want to improve it? It … | Continue reading
Well, I missed a Recently post on January 1st, so scratch any other resolutions, I’ll just live my life. Reading In loving memory of the square checkbox is the kind of UX rant I’m there for. Interfaces that have different behaviors should look different, and familiar styles are s … | Continue reading
Every few months on Twitter, there’s some dustup about work-life balance and whether it’s a good or bad idea to work hard when you’re young. Like most of these recurring debates, it has generated two opposite archetypes: The anti-capitalist tells the young worker not to trust HR … | Continue reading
Placemark is now open source! In short: MIT license TypeScript codebase Contributions welcome If you want to learn about the open source codebase, I wrote quite a few blog posts about the architecture that are now archived in the docs repo. The README has been expanded, to s … | Continue reading
The last time I wrote a “year in review” post was 2017, and before that in 2012. Reading my old writing is nostalgic and horrific. By the numbers, 2023 was pretty normal: I read around 20 books, ran around 400 miles. It’s funny how the statistics even out to the same numbers whe … | Continue reading
Most people I know fit into one of two camps: they either want to buy a house and they can’t, or they’ve bought a house. The desire to own ones own home is almost universal in the people I know in the US. It’s even stronger for folks who live outside of major cities. And people f … | Continue reading
I saw Tim Hecker at Pioneer Works, and was astounded by the opener, Mizu. Bought the album as soon as I got home. It is, crudely explained, like if Zoë Keating dialed up the synths and pedals and rhythm, and it was also a remarkable live show. Distant Intervals by MIZU Reading … | Continue reading
also on placemark.io/blog The company and product side of Placemark didn’t work out. Some fantastic, friendly people used it, but I couldn’t find a way to make it work as a sustainable bootstrapped startup. Building it was incredibly fun. Failing to find success and sustainabilit … | Continue reading
I developed an old roll of film and the photos are pretty decent! My Olympus XA-2 is my default walking-around camera. I love it, but its age is showing and I’m envious of the crisp photos that people get out of later-era SLR film cameras. Thinking about getting a lightweight vie … | Continue reading
October was another pleasantly busy month in Brooklyn. Really took advantage of the breadth of New York culture: I saw an opera at the Metropolitan Opera House, and then went to see prog-metal band Polyphia play guitar solos as fast as possible. At the latter, there were multiple … | Continue reading
One of my other long-term projects has been building new graphics for my Tidbyt in Rust. It has been a slow, silly process in which I celebrate when a single pixel lights up on the device. I’m not even writing firmware or code that runs “on the device” - that’s a stretch goal for … | Continue reading
We saw this Monarch butterfly caterpillar at the pretty unusual Naval Cemetery Landscape. The landscape is just native pollinators and native plants growing wild, with a wood platform above the field so you can walk around and see the bugs and plants. It’s also built on a cemeter … | Continue reading
I last sang the praises of Fastmail in 2018, writing about how it’s pretty easy to avoid Google now that Google’s products are relatively middling. I’ve been using Fastmail exclusively since then and have only good things to say about it. The user interface is rock-solid and fast … | Continue reading
Since July, I’ve been archiving data from the Citi Bike GBFS feed. Every five minutes, I have a datapoint for each of the roughly 2,090 stations with numbers for how many bikes are available or broken, and how many bikes are electric. It’s a long-term project that combines my int … | Continue reading
Early this month I arrived at work to see a Concorde parked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It’s been fun to identify the ships docked there, but an airplane was new, especially such a rare one. I guess a lot of airplane knowledge from my childhood has stayed with me, and being greete … | Continue reading
A few weeks ago, HashiCorp switched its default license for future product releases to the BSL license. The BSL license was created by the people at MariaDB in 2017 to give companies a way to release software as open source but prohibit their competitors from re-hosting that soft … | Continue reading
This will be three Recently monthly blog posts in a row, without a regular post in the middle. I’ll write a standalone post again, soon enough. It’s been another busy year and I’m as aware as ever of the challenge of keeping all of my habits and outputs going. Some, like reading … | Continue reading
Writing in from Washington, DC, my once-hometown and the birthplace of Mapbox. This one will be quick because I’m between one thing and another! Listening Dry Daniel by Buke and Gase Buke and Gase released some music they recorded a while ago, and there are some hits in it. I esp … | Continue reading
Listening My friend Dave Infante has been busy – he launched his own beer-centric podcast, Taplines, and guest-starred on the enormous Chapo Trap House podcast. Reading It’s been a slow few weeks for books, but since I skipped Recently in May, I can still talk about Achieving Ou … | Continue reading
Like everyone, I’ve been thinking about AI. It’s already useful, in a way that the previous big thing, crypto, wasn’t. I don’t think it’ll become generalized AI - I think the AI winter cycle is the base case and human-like intelligence is qualitatively different than LLM, no matt … | Continue reading
The weather is starting to get better. Listening Gift from the Trees by Mammal Hands I am still really loving the constellation of bands around Mammal Hands. They just released a new album, “Gift from the Trees”, and it’s really excellent. RETURN by tAKX Their guitarist, Stephen … | Continue reading
For the last few jobs, I’ve kept a private are.na board of competition. Every time I saw something that looked like it was competing with Observable, or Placemark, or val.town I’d add it to the list. Eventually I’d have a big gallery of screenshots of all the other companies and … | Continue reading
What to say about this month - well, I’m a few days late to the Recently, because I’ve been pretty busy! Things are good. Building products is fun but also a lot of work. Pretty excited about what I’m working on. Ready for winter to end. Reading I enjoyed reading Ross Barkan’s Wh … | Continue reading
This was a big month of change for me – I announced that I was joining Val.town and wrote a big update about Placemark. Plenty more to write, but at least here I’ll take a little breather and just do the usual: what’s new! Reading I only finished one book this month - Meet Us By … | Continue reading
Yesterday, I announced that I was joining Val.town, but that Placemark lived. And I haven’t really given an update on Placemark, the product and business, in a while. Writing about an operating business is a different thing that writing feature announcements or essays about techn … | Continue reading
Last week I joined val.town as Steve Krouse’s cofounder. Val.town is a system for programming in the small, for writing short programs in TypeScript that can link together into something larger. It’s for writing that scheduled web scraper or basic API that you wanted to make but … | Continue reading
Happy 2023! I wrote my “2022 in review” in my paper journal and will write about some retrospectives on how the business and such have gone, but for now, let’s keep this traditional, a good old-fashioned Recently. Reading This month’s theme, looking back on it, was feminism, and … | Continue reading
This year I read 22 books, which is about the average for the last few years. The ratio of fiction to non-fiction was skewed toward non-fiction. I think overall I read fewer amazing books than last year, when I finished 20, but also fewer duds - though there certainly were some d … | Continue reading
ActivityPub, WebFinger, and Mastodon are getting some attention because of chaos at Twitter It’s anyone’s guess how this all shakes out. As an active user of Twitter, it’ll be sad if it goes away. But in the meantime, let’s have some fun with ActivityPub. ActivityPub Under the ho … | Continue reading
November was another packed month of travel, work, and making the most of New York before the snow takes over. Reading I finally finished Barbarian Days. I think it took over a month to get through it - kept losing momentum by taking a few days off from reading during a trip. It … | Continue reading
It’s too easy lately to get into a very pessimistic mood about technology. Between the developer energy wasted on crypto, which has produced negative real-world value, the wider downturn in tech stocks, and the often-antagonistic interactions between developers on Twitter and els … | Continue reading
We went apple picking this month in New Jersey, and one of the farms had these two golden retrievers in their own, private, enormous pen. It was a petting zoo, but with two golden retrievers. They defended their space against other dogs who wanted to say hi, but stayed near the s … | Continue reading
Summer screeched to a halt a few days ago and I’m still reeling from it. The dehumidifiers turned off, the humidifiers on. The A/C off, the heat on. I’m still, more than a year after leaving the west coast, grateful for the presence of seasons to keep me aware of time passing, bu … | Continue reading
Here’s some new JavaScript on this website. It’s the only JavaScript on most pages, which are otherwise pretty minimal. try { if (document.referrer) { const ref = new URL(document.referrer); if (ref.host === 'news.ycombinator.com') { window.location.href = 'https://google … | Continue reading
For fun, I wrote a raytracer in Zig yesterday. It’s a port of a project I did in 2013, in JavaScript. It’s the first time in a while I’ve made a project just for kicks. If you look at the number of GitHub repositories I’ve committed to since 2013, the number is decreasing. Same w … | Continue reading
There are few people I’ve worked as closely with as Saman Bemel Benrud. We built a lot of stuff together at Mapbox, from iD to Mapbox Studio. But he was insistent that after this job, he was going to make games and comics. No more tech rocket ships. He’s gone and done it. Saman, … | Continue reading
This was another exciting, busy, and challenging month. Placemark clocked in another month of pretty good organic growth, and I spent a week at Gradient Retreat, which was everything I hoped it would be - relaxing, intellectually invigorating, a place where I got to know a bunch … | Continue reading
July felt like several months in the space of one. It was a busy work month on Placemark, busy warm weekends in Brooklyn, then a lovely trip to Konstanz, Paris, and Switzerland. Reading I finally got my momentum back with reading, thanks in part to those transatlantic flights an … | Continue reading