2025-07-28 03:00:00
Some lessons I’ve learned from experience.
Become totally dependent on others, that’s why they call them “dependencies” after all! Lean in to it.
Once your dependencies break — and they will, time breaks all things — then you can spend lots of time and energy (which was your goal from the beginning) ripping out those dependencies and replacing them with new dependencies that will break later.
Why rip them out? Because you can’t fix them. You don’t even know how they work, that’s why you introduced them in the first place!
Repeat ad nauseam (that is, until you decide you don’t want to make websites that require lots of your time and energy, but that’s not your goal if you’re reading this article).
Once you hitch your wagon to a framework (a dependency, see above) then any updates to your site via the framework require that you first understand what changed in the framework.
More of your time and energy expended, mission accomplished!
Put a critical dependency between working on your website and using it in the browser. You know, some mechanism that is required to function before you can even see your website — like a complication step or build process. The bigger and more complex, the better.
This is a great way to spend lots of time and energy working on your website.
(Well, technically it’s not really working on your website. It’s working on the thing that spits out your website. So you’ll excuse me for recommending something that requires your time and energy that isn’t your website — since that’s not the stated goal — but trust me, this apparent diversion will directly affect the overall amount of time and energy you spend making a website. So, ultimately, it will still help you reach our stated goal.)
Requiring that the code you write be transpiled, compiled, parsed, and evaluated before it can be used in your website is a great way to spend extra time and energy making a website (as opposed to, say, writing code as it will be run which would save you time and energy and is not our goal here).
Do you have more advice on building a website that will require a lot of your time and energy? Share your recommendations with others, in case they’re looking for such advice.
2025-07-18 03:00:00
Here’s Jony Ive in his Stripe interview:
What we make stands testament to who we are. What we make describes our values. It describes our preoccupations. It describes beautiful succinctly our preoccupation.
I’d never really noticed the connection between these two words: occupation and preoccupation.
What comes before occupation? Pre-occupation.
What comes before what you do for a living? What you think about. What you’re preoccupied with.
What you think about will drive you towards what you work on.
So when you’re asking yourself, “What comes next? What should I work on?”
Another way of asking that question is, “What occupies my thinking right now?”
And if what you’re occupied with doesn’t align with what you’re preoccupied with, perhaps it's time for a change.
2025-07-15 03:00:00
Here’s Jony Ive talking to Patrick Collison about measurement and numbers:
People generally want to talk about product attributes that you can measure easily with a number…schedule, costs, speed, weight, anything where you can generally agree that six is a bigger number than two
He says he used to get mad at how often people around him focused on the numbers of the work over other attributes of the work.
But after giving it more thought, he now has a more generous interpretation of why we do this: because we want relate to each other, understand each other, and be inclusive of one another. There are many things we can’t agree on, but it’s likely we can agree that six is bigger than two. And so in this capacity, numbers become a tool for communicating with each other, albeit a kind of least common denominator — e.g. “I don’t agree with you at all, but I can’t argue that 134 is bigger than 87.”
This is conducive to a culture where we spend all our time talking about attributes we can easily measure (because then we can easily communicate and work together) and results in a belief that the only things that matter are those which can be measured.
People will give lip service to that not being the case, e.g. “We know there are things that can’t be measured that are important.” But the reality ends up being: only that which can be assigned a number gets managed, and that which gets managed is imbued with importance because it is allotted our time, attention, and care.
This reminds me of the story of the judgement of King Solomon, an archetypal story found in cultures around the world. Here’s the story as summarized on Wikipedia:
Solomon ruled between two women who both claimed to be the mother of a child. Solomon ordered the baby be cut in half, with each woman to receive one half. The first woman accepted the compromise as fair, but the second begged Solomon to give the baby to her rival, preferring the baby to live, even without her. Solomon ordered the baby given to the second woman, as her love was selfless, as opposed to the first woman's selfish disregard for the baby's actual well-being
In an attempt to resolve the friction between two individuals, an appeal was made to numbers as an arbiter. We can’t agree on who the mother is, so let’s make it a numbers problem. Reduce the baby to a number and we can agree!
But that doesn’t work very well, does it?
I think there is a level of existence where measurement and numbers are a sound guide, where two and two make four and two halves make a whole.
But, as humans, there is another level of existence where mathematical propositions don’t translate. A baby is not a quantity. A baby is an entity. Take a whole baby and divide it up by a sword and you do not half two halves of a baby.
I am not a number. I’m an individual. Indivisible.
What does this all have to do with software? Software is for us as humans, as individuals, and because of that I believe there is an aspect of its nature where metrics can’t take you.cIn fact, not only will numbers not guide you, they may actually misguide you.
I think Robin Rendle articulated this well in his piece “Trust the vibes”:
[numbers] are not representative of human experience or human behavior and can’t tell you anything about beauty or harmony or how to be funny or what to do next and then how to do it.
Wisdom is knowing when to use numbers and when to use something else.
2025-07-11 03:00:00
Exploring diagram.website, I came across The Computer is a Feeling by Tim Hwang and Omar Rizwan:
the modern internet exerts a tyranny over our imagination. The internet and its commercial power has sculpted the computer-device. It's become the terrain of flat, uniform, common platforms and protocols, not eccentric, local, idiosyncratic ones.
Before computers were connected together, they were primarily personal. Once connected, they became primarily social. The purpose of the computer shifted to become social over personal.
The triumph of the internet has also impoverished our sense of computers as a tool for private exploration rather than public expression. The pre-network computer has no utility except as a kind of personal notebook, the post-network computer demotes this to a secondary purpose.
Smartphones are indisputably the personal computer. And yet, while being so intimately personal, they’re also the largest distribution of behavior-modification devices the world has ever seen. We all willing carry around in our pockets a device whose content is largely designed to modify our behavior and extract our time and money.
Making “computer” mean computer-feelings and not computer-devices shifts the boundaries of what is captured by the word. It removes a great many things – smartphones, language models, “social” “media” – from the domain of the computational. It also welcomes a great many things – notebooks, papercraft, diary, kitchen – back into the domain of the computational.
I love the feeling of a personal computer, one whose purpose primarily resides in the domain of the individual and secondarily supports the social. It’s part of what I love about the some of the ideas embedded in local-first, which start from the principle of owning and prioritizing what you do on your computer first and foremost, and then secondarily syncing that to other computers for the use of others.
2025-07-08 03:00:00
After publishing my Analysis of Links From The White House’s “Wire” Website, Tina Nguyen, political correspondent at The Verge, reached out with some questions.
Her questions made me realize that the numbers in my analysis weren’t quite correct (I wasn’t de-depulicating links across days, so I fixed that problem).
More pointedly, she asked about the most popular domain the White House was linking to: YouTube. Specifically, were the links to YouTube 1) independent content creators, 2) the White House itself, or 3) a mix.
A great question. I didn’t know the answer but wanted to find out. A little JavaScript code in my spreadsheet and boom, I had all the YouTube links in one place.
![Screenshot of a table of data in a spreadsheet showing all the links to YouTube from wh[dot]gov/wire](https://cdn.jim-nielsen.com/blog/2025/whwire-followup-youtube-links.png)
I couldn’t really discern from the links themselves what I was looking at. A number of them were to the /live/ subpath, meaning I was looking at links to live streaming events. But most of the others were YouTube’s standard /watch?v=:id which leaves the content and channel behind the URL opaque. The only real way to know was to click through to each one.
I did a random sampling and found most of the ones I clicked on all went to The White House’s own YouTube channel. I told Tina as much, sent here the data I had, and she reported on it in an article at The Verge.
Tina’s question did get me wondering: precisely how many of those links are to the White House’s own YouTube channel vs. other content creators?
Once again, writing scripts that process data, talk to APIs, and put it all into 2-dimensional tables in a spreadsheet was super handy.
I looked at all the YouTube links, extracted the video ID, then queried the YouTube API for information about the video (like what channel it belongs to). Once I had the script working as expected for a single cell, it was easy to do the spreadsheet thing where you just “drag down” to autocomplete all the other cells with video IDs.
The result?
From May 8th to July 6th there were 78 links to YouTube from wh.gov/wire, which breaks down as follows:
2025-07-07 03:00:00
There’s a video on YouTube from “Technology Connections” — who I’ve never heard of or watched until now — called Algorithms are breaking how we think. I learned of this video from Gedeon Maheux of The Iconfactory fame. Speaking in the context of why they made Tapestry, he said the ideas in this video would be their manifesto.
So I gave it a watch.
Generally speaking, the video asks: Does anyone care to have a self-directed experience online, or with a computer more generally?
I'm not sure how infrequently we’re actually deciding for ourselves these days [how we decide what we want to see, watch, and do on the internet]
Ironically we spend more time than ever on computing devices, but less time than ever curating our own experiences with them.
Which — again ironically — is the inverse of many things in our lives.
Generally speaking, the more time we spend with something, the more we invest in making it our own — customizing it to our own idiosyncrasies.
But how much time do you spend curating, customizing, and personalizing your digital experience? (If you’re reading this in an RSS reader, high five!)
I’m not talking about “I liked that post, or saved that video, so the algorithm is personalizing things for me”.
Do you know what to get yourself more of?
Do you know where to find it?
Do you even ask yourself these questions?
“That sounds like too much work” you might say.
And you’re right, it is work. As the guy in the video says:
I'm one of those weirdos who think the most rewarding things in life take effort
Me too.
