Applied Cartography

It is rare that I review a book before I finish it. Sometimes I do this with bad books that I have not completed - but that is what the Goodreads user base calls DNFing it, explicitly saying that I am not going to finish, and therefore am capital-D done w

Jesse wrote this interesting article on technical debt, which resonated with me spiritually but not directionally -- which is a very weird way to say that I agree with some parts and disagree with others (so you should read this not as a critique of the p

Earlier this year I mentioned that Slay the Spire 2 had reached the status of needing to be deleted from my computer, on the grounds that it was proving too big of a distraction. More recently, a second game has reached that same ignoble height - except i

Two friends, upon learning that I wanted to get into Clarice Lispector, advised me not to start with Near to the Wild Heart. Having now finished the book, I think I understand why. The two parallels that come to mind - less in terms of style and message t

Last year, I watched The War Room, the documentary following Bill Clinton's first campaign - a film I am remiss for having never written about, because it was captivating, satisfying, and illuminating. And whether for good reasons or bad, it punctured mos

Perhaps the single most consequential essay I've read is Will Larson's Work on what matters. This is ostensibly advice targeted towards staff engineers, but the content generalizes across disciplines. One of the failure modes he talks about is snacking: I

Nick pointed me towards Marcin who pointed me towards immich's list of cursed knowledge the other day, and it has already become a running joke in the Slack. Here is a baker's dozen of Buttondown's own cursed knowledge: 1Yes, that's the joke. The Python u

More by luck than by fate, most of the great protagonists of the last forty years of television have escaped forever being associated with the character they played. Jon Hamm's love of comedy means that, in a bizarre way, I think of him more as a guest on

No matter what, you're going to have a great time watching this movie. It is funny and audacious and handcrafted, which is a quality that feels increasingly absent from the modern cinematic landscape. It is hard to get an honest-to-God comedy released the

As I've covered somewhat extensively in prior writing (see A month of OpEx quick wins and Self-hosting our GitHub Action runners), this year has been marked by a careful and deliberate shrinking of our stack, button down, with the goals of, in order, one,