I admit, like many of my compatriots in this last year and a half, I follow a lot more tennis than usual, and it is all the fault (or merit) of Jannick Sinner. The top-level pro tennis field appears distant, privileged, brilliant and rewarding. We appreciate the immense talent of these players and sympathize with the struggle and stress they undergo. We praise their character, determination, and mental strength. They make a lot of money, so we infer they conduct fulfilling and satisfying lives. Most fans, however, ignore how crowded, harsh, lonely, and unapologetic professional players’ lives are below the elite. ...

In the end we won because the open source community started to converge on distributed version control and we were the only ones in the hosting space that truly cared about how developers worked at all. The only ones who questioned it, approached it from first principles, tried to make it better holistically rather than just throwing more features onto something existing in order to sell it. Full story here. A great run-down by Scott Cahon himself on why Git and then GitHub won the version control system war. ...

At home, we haven’t done anything about it yet: we’re still 100% grid-dependant and old-fashioned, partly because it would be problematic for us as we live in an apartment building and partly because, frankly, it still seems expensive, especially with three kids studying away from home. Also, I want to avoid getting entangled in another project; my mental bandwidth is limited (and I suspect it will only worsen over time.) ...

A few days into making One Million Checkboxes I thought I’d been hacked. What was that doing in my database? A few hours later I was tearing up, proud of some brilliant teens. Full story here. What a great story. Teenagers who are enthusiastic about hacking and coding and have lots of fun in creative ways. It reminds me so much of my teenage years, like when assembling a fake backdoor on Lorien, my first BBS, as a honeypot to attract local hackers so I could later reach out and get to know them1. ...

For nerds of my generation, Infocom is a legend. Today, I watched the long-time overdue Infocom: The Documentary and I found it to be a gem. With no commentary or narration but made up of the protagonists’ testimonies alone, it effectively evokes the excitement and enthusiasm around the early computer game industry (and software development in general) of those early years. It is also a cautionary tale about how easy it is to fall once you reach the peak1 ...

I’m abandoning Twitter/X. I’ll freeze the account without deleting it; never say never, but I don’t plan on coming back. I no longer feel comfortable on that platform and haven’t been for a while. If you still want to follow me (I’d love for you to do so), the best option is my website where I always post first (RSS feed here), the mailing list, or Mastodon.

We spent a weekend in Venice1 a short while ago, and one of the things that caught my attention was the wells in the city’s squares. Is there fresh water underneath that brackish swamp water? Well, no. The water from the wells in Venice is rainwater, collected by an ingenious hydraulic collection system that leveraged the square and surrounding buildings. I learned this and other intriguing tidbits by watching The Crazy Engineering of Venice on YouTube. ...

Quoting Bryan Baun: Capability makes your life simpler. Tolerance, skills, knowledge, and health are always with you, wherever you go. They are assets but they take up no space. They are stored in your body. Some lack capability through no fault of their own, but anyone can increase their capability. It’s an investment that pays dividends every day.

Rand Fishkin on the evolution of digital marketing: Well, marketing friends, we gotta have a serious talk. Because the way we’ve done marketing for the last twenty years is ending. I’m serious. I believe that Rand in 2010 would have told you that digital marketing was all about being able to track every view and every click, so that when conversions happened, we could perfectly attribute them, is wrong today. Back then, we could say: “Oh, this piece of content, this advertisement, this PR investment, this word-of-mouth effort is worthwhile because it turned into this trackable, perfectly attributable series of events in our analytics.” It doesn’t work this way anymore. That’s because clicks are dying and attribution is dying. There’s only one way forward. ...

I dig the attempt at a Solarpunk Manifesto. Solarpunk is a movement in speculative fiction, art, fashion, and activism that seeks to answer and embody the question “what does a sustainable civilization look like, and how can we get there?” The aesthetics of solarpunk merge the practical with the beautiful, the well-designed with the green and lush, the bright and colorful with the earthy and solid. Solarpunk can be utopian, just optimistic, or concerned with the struggles en route to a better world , but never dystopian. As our world roils with calamity, we need solutions, not only warnings. ...