2026-03-27 20:00:00
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Nikhil Anand, whose blog can be found at nikhil.io.
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Hi I'm Nikhil! I grew up the UAE and came to the United States for college and graduated with a degree in biomedical engineering. I worked in academia and industry for about 15 years before deciding to turn my attention and energies towards problems in healthcare. I'm now a graduate student at Columbia University's Medical Center and am studying clinical informatics and loving the magnificent beehive that is New York City. With the time I have, I love going to art museums, practicing calligraphy, reading short stories and graphic novels, and watching every suspense/mystery show or movie I can (huge fan of the genre; for example I've watched all of Columbo at least three times). I'm also trying to learn CAD and have 3D printed several small abominations.
I started blogging around 2003 after discovering blogs like Kottke.org, Jeffrey Zeldman's blog, Greg Storey's Airbag.ca, and Todd Dominey's WhatDoIKnow.org. My first blog was at freeorange.net which I now use as a placeholder for my tiny LLC's future site.
I used to live in Ames, Iowa at the time and decided to and blog what I knew, about stuff going on in the town: gossip, lectures and shows I'd attended, photos of random scenes and events, and so on. That last part proved to be great: I'd hear from a quite a few alumni or former residents who'd have photo requests for nostalgia and I'd gladly oblige, especially since I was super excited to use my first digital camera, a whopping 5 megapixel Sony DSC-F717 😊
I then stopped blogging for about 10 or so years and resumed in 2018. My current blog is essentially a freeform dump: just this mélange of stuff I find interesting and/or may want to reference later. There's really no audience in mind. I use a lot of tags on my posts and am often delighted by exploring them a while later. I moved all my bookmarks over from PinBoard (an excellent service) and am trying to get off Instagram. I'm also trying to be better about making and sharing things (photos, calligraphy, art) no matter how terrible they are and not just consuming them.
As for the name, I really wanted a domain hack, www.nikh.il, but this sadly required permission from the Israeli government I was pretty sure I wouldn't get 😅 So I went with the shortest and 'coolest' TLD I could find and ended up with nikhil.io. I also have nikhil.fish as an alias for no reason.
I think half my site's half a a tumblelog. As for the other half, I have a Markdown file called log.md in my iCloud Drive that I dump inchoate thoughts into (it's at about half a meg right now). I also use the excellent Things app on my phone to save blog posts, names, recommendations, articles, and media of interest to peruse later. When I have time, I look at these two sources to post and comment on something I think is beautiful, interesting, or funny.
All professional creatives I know personally have a space that they attend to do their work and they have told me that this matters immensely to them. In my case, I have a setup I've used reliably over many years and love it. I especially love my sit-to-stand desk (on wheels), giant display, and clickity-clack keyboard. I always listen to ambient music or white noise while working on anything (Loscil's works are a favorite).
I've found that I just cannot focus in coffeehouses or libraries. And I absolutely cannot work or think in harsh "cool white" lighting (3000K or lower; if you need me to divulge secrets, just put me in a room with two tubelights for thirty seconds). I know a lot of people (like my wife, a writer) who can work anywhere and may be a bit envious. I am also in the habit of pacing around and muttering things to myself while working and these are not nice things to do at coffeehouses or libraries.
I write all my posts in Markdown and use an old and heavily modded version of 11ty.js with several Markdown-it plugins and supported by quite a few bash and Node scripts to generate the HTML pages. Images are processed with Sharp. The blog theme is a mess of TSX and SASS files. All posts and code are in git and Github. I build everything on my laptop and sync all the files to an S3 bucket that serves my blog through CloudFront.
Not really. I've spent enough time monkeying with the design/structure and code where my setup fits my needs like a bespoke suit. You can always nerd out over tooling, and it's a lot of fun, but I've suspended that in favor of using the tools. For the time being at least 😅
Now if my wife or a friend were starting a blog, I would absolutely recommend a platform like Bear. Anything simple, hosted, not creepy, and not run by greedy and/or awful people.
It costs ~$5 a month. A giant part of that cost is the domain name. Zero revenue. No plans on 'growing' it or whatever; it's just my little garden on the internet.
I have no problem with people monetising their blogs as long as the strategy they employ is respectful to visitors' privacy and unobtrusive to their experience. Patronage/memberships aside, The Deck comes to mind as an ad platform that achieved both these things very well.
I do have my problems with platforms like Substack and might write a blog post about this later.
Please interview Chris Glass! His lovely and popular blog is a huge inspiration for mine, layout and content, and he's been at it since at least 2003 IIRC. Another old favorite is Witold Riedel's log. I'm also really digging this blog I discovered recently.
I just put up a small project I've wanted to do for a while, my own little curated digital gallery of art I've loved over the years. It was mostly a design exercise but I thought I might use some LLM to discover some themes in why I love these works (or maybe you just love looking at things and don't really need to understand why).
Other than that, I am so happy with what feels to me like a resurgence in personal blogging (here's a recent index of personal blogs from readers of HackerNews). Thank you for having me in your beautiful space and featuring several other lovely and interesting people! This is a fantastic project Manu 🤗
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2026-03-26 22:25:00
Every time I stumble on articles or posts discussing tech products, I’m perplexed when someone uses the word “successful” to describe a product with a lot of users. There’s a better word for products like that, and that’s “popular”. Maybe I’m the odd one here, but I don’t think the popularity of a product is what we should use to evaluate if it’s also a successful one.
If I were given 50 billion to spend, and I used it to open a restaurant where everyone could come and eat for free, every day, no strings attached, I am confident my restaurant would become instantly very popular, and it would be fully booked, all the time. Would you consider that a successful restaurant? I’d say no because, unless someone keeps giving me money to burn, at some point, I’d have to shut everything down or I’d have to completely change my business model and stop giving away meals for free, which is what made my restaurant popular in the first place.
Now, if I were to run a tech strategy on my restaurant, I’d keep burning enough money until all the other restaurants in my area are out of business because the obviously can’t compete against free, and once that happens I’d start charging people money since now they have no choice but to come to my restaurant if they want to eat out.
Or, option B, I’d start doing something insanely shady, like sprinkling crack cocaine on my dishes to make people addicted to my restaurant. Both options are atrocious, and if you disagree, well, fuck you.
A product being popular is an indication of a lot of people using it. Doesn’t necessarily mean that the product is good. Doesn’t necessarily mean it’s successful. And if you want proof of that, just browse the Google graveyard. Or pay attention to whatever the fuck Open AI is doing or not doing these days, since it seems to me that they’re killing products left and right.
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2026-03-21 21:25:00
Following the 7-step approach and the 1-step approach, and also channelling the spirit of the longstanding tradition of learning how to draw owls on the internet:
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2026-03-20 20:00:00
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Melanie Richards, whose blog can be found at melanie-richards.com/blog.
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I’m a Group Product Manager co-leading the core product at Webflow, i.e. helping teams visually design and build websites. My personal mission is to empower people to make inspiring, impactful, and inclusive things on the web. That’s been the through line of my career so far: I started out as a designer at a full-service agency called Fuzzco, moved to the web platform at Microsoft Edge, continued building for developers at Netlify, and am now aiming to make web creation even more democratic with the Webflow platform.
I transitioned from design to product management while at Microsoft Edge. I wanted to take part in steering the future of the web platform, instead of remaining downstream of those decisions. I feel so lucky to have worked on new features in HTML, ARIA, CSS, and JavaScript with other PMs and developers in the W3C and WHATWG.
I’m a builder at heart, so I love to work on webby side projects as well as a whole bevy of analog hobbies: knitting, sewing, weaving, sketchbooking, and journaling.
I have a couple primary blogs right now:
From 2013–2016 I also had a blog and directory called Badass Lady Creatives (wish I had spent more than five minutes on the name, haha). This featured women who were doing cool things in various “creative” industries. At the time it seemed like every panel, conference lineup, and group project featured all or mostly dudes. The blog was a way to push back on that a little bit and highlight people who were potentially overlooked. Since then gender representation (for one) seems to have gotten a bit better in these industries. But the work and joy of celebrating diverse, inspiring talent is never done!
Big “yeet to production” vibes for me! I use Obsidian to scribble down my thoughts and write an initial draft. Obsidian creates Markdown files, so I copy and paste those into Visual Studio Code (my code editor), add some images and make some tweaks, and then push to production. I really try not to overthink it too much. However, I will admit that I have a tons of drafts in Obsidian that never see the light of day. It can be cathartic enough just to scribble it down, even if I never publish the thought.
For my Learning Log posts, I use a Readwise => Obsidian workflow I describe in this blog post. Reader by Readwise is the app where I store and read all my RSS feeds and newsletter forwards.
“Parallel play” is the biggest, most joyful boon to my creativity. I love to be in the company of others as we independently work on our own projects side by side.
There’s a delicate balance when it comes to working on creative projects socially. For example, my mom, my aunt, and I often have Sew Day over FaceTime on Sundays. Everyone’s pretty committed to what they’re working on, so it’s easy to sew and talk and sing (badly 😂) at the same time. I also used to go to a local craft night that very sadly disbanded when the host shop changed hands.
For writing or coding, that takes a bit more mental focus for me. I started a Discord server with a few friends, which is dedicated to working on blog posts and side projects. We meet up once a month to talk about our projects (and shoot the breeze, usually about web accessibility and/or the goodness of dogs). Then we all log off the voice channel to go do the thing!
Both of these blogs use Eleventy and plain ol’ Markdown, and are hosted on Netlify. Some of my other side projects use a content management system (CMS) like Webflow’s CMS, or Contentful + Eleventy. Again, Webflow is my current employer.
I use a Netlify form for comments on my “Making” blog, and Webmentions for my main blog. I will probably pull out Webmentions from that code base: conceptually they’ve never really “landed” for me, and it would be nice to delete a ton of code.
I generally like my setup, though sometimes I think about migrating my “Making” blog onto a CMS. As far as CMSes go, I quite like Webflow’s: it’s straightforward and has that Goldilocks level of functionality for me. Some other CMSes I’ve tried have felt bloated yet seemed to miss obvious functionality out of the box.
I have a Bookshop.org affiliate link and it took me several years to meet the $20 minimum payout so…yeah I’ve never truly monetized my blogging! I find there’s freedom in giving away your thoughts for free.
As far as costs go, I have pretty low overhead: just paying for the domain name.
I’m fine with other folks monetizing personal blogs, though of course there’s a classy and not-classy way to do so. If monetizing is what keeps bloggers’ work on the open web, on sites they own and control, I prefer that over monetizing through walled gardens. Related: Substack makes it easy to monetize but there are some very compelling reasons to consider alternatives.
This is highly topical: I’m currently scheming about a directory site listing “maker” blogs! So many communities in the visual arts and crafts are stuck on social media platforms they don’t even enjoy, beholden to the whims of an algorithm. I’d like to connect makers in a more organic way. If you’re a crafter who would like to be part of this, feel free to fill out this Google form!
Now that you're done reading the interview, go check the blog and subscribe to the RSS feed.
If you're looking for more content, go read one of the previous 134 interviews.
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2026-03-19 22:40:00
We’re all familiar with social media: the Facebooks, the Twitters, the TikToks of this silly digital world. They have invaded our lives and taken over our time and attention. We have spent the past decade posting, snapping, tweeting, reeling (?), tiktoking (??). We fall asleep youtubing, only to wake up with our “for you” page completely fucked up because the algorithm lives a life of its own and has decided to profile us as someone who loves sheep herding and carpet cleaning (and, you know, maybe it's right).
But imagine for a second if someone managed to reinvent social media. Imagine if there was a new product out there on the internet. A product so revolutionary, so original, so refreshingly different, that it will completely transform the way you feel and interact with other people online.
Can you feel the excitement building? Well, I’m sorry—not sorry—to disappoint you because that product is not here. What is here, though (blame Kevin), is a silly little experiment: the Dealgorithm IRC server. I was thinking about setting an IRC server up just for fun, and he took the idea, ran with it, and the server is now live.
Now, contrary to the fools at Digg, I know how the web works, and there’s no chance in hell I’d let this server open to the internet, so that every weirdo out there could join. Which is why, if you’re interested in joining, you need to apply by filling out this form. I’m not going to request a copy of your ID…for now.
The server is currently set up to retain up to 2000 messages per channel for up to 48 hours. We might play with these settings, but I don’t want this to be a place for content to stick around. The idea is to have a space where a bunch of people can hang out in a very casual way and talk about anything they find interesting.
We may or may not permanently ban you if you profess your love for AI. You’ve been warned.
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2026-03-18 16:10:00
In my “closing thoughts” post about the phone usage experiment, I mentioned I had deeper thoughts I wanted to share. Here I am, sharing those thoughts. I ran various month-long life experiments over the years, many of which I chronicled here on this blog. For that reason, the outcome of this recent phone experiment wasn’t a surprise: if I make the conscious decision to pay attention to some specific aspect of my life, there’s a high likelihood I’ll manage to enact significant changes in that specific area. Or so I thought.
You see, I am a flawed human being, like many—most?—of the people out there. If I were in therapy, there would be a plethora of issues I’d be discussing with my therapist, but in therapy I am not, and so I thought it would be fun—for me at least, not sure about you—to tackle one of them here, since it’s strictly related to this recent phone experiment.
«Wait a second, if that’s the case, then why aren’t you in therapy, Manu?» Good question, I’m glad you asked. There are two main reasons. The first, and less important reason, is that I am a stubborn motherfucker, and the idea of asking someone else to help me fix my inner issues is something that doesn’t sit right with me. The second, and more important reason, is that I have a fundamental distrust of psychologists. Not in psychology as a field, I have no issues with that. I even considered going into psychology back when I was about to finish high school and was thinking about possible career paths. I also read plenty of psychology books, and the book that had more impact on me growing up was a psychology book written by a psychologist.
The issue I have with psychologists is that all the ones I had the pleasure to meet in person were deeply flawed and fucked up individuals, and that left an impression on me. Now I carry this fundamental (and partly irrational) distrust in them, which is a bit problematic since it’s hard to go to therapy when you don’t trust the person on the other side. Maybe this will change at some point in the future, who knows. I'm open to that possibility.
Anyway, to get back on track, the issue I wanted to discuss is related to disappointment. Specifically, my issue with the concept of disappointing others. This is something I had to deal with since I was a kid, and I’m not sure why that is. I don’t know if it was triggered by something specific that happened or if it’s just part of my character, but disappointing others and especially the thought of seeing them disappointed because of something I did or didn’t do, is something I have always struggled with. To this day, I still do.
The reason why I think this is all related to my weird life experiments is that those experiments usually follow a pattern: I experiment with something, I blog about it, I get to enjoy the benefits of some positive change, the experiment ends, I stop blogging about it, and slowly but surely the old habits manage to creep back in. It happens every time, like clockwork. But this time around, I realised that the reason why it happens is that I, fundamentally, do not give much of a fuck about myself. That itself is a topic for another time, but in the context of this discussion, the thing that matters is that as long as I’m blogging and I’m sharing my experience, the irrational pressure of disappointing someone keeps me on track. At a rational level, I know that no one gives a fuck if I fail at these silly experiments, and yet, for some reason, that extra pressure is what keeps me in check.
Now, is this a healthy way to exist in this world? Probably not. Do I care? Definitely not. But, having realised this, I’m now wondering how I can exploit this to my advantage. Because there are things I’d love to change in my life, and I’m starting to think leveraging the disappointment-lever to my advantage could be the way to go.
My phone usage, for example, is still under control, and that’s because I know I’m gonna keep sharing those numbers. Not weekly, because that’s boring, but probably every couple of months. And this fact alone, the decision of doing this, is apparently enough to keep my brain on track.
Brains are weird, what can I say? I’m still figuring out which changes I want to put in place in my life. The tricky part is that they need to be trackable and shareable somehow; otherwise, this will not work, but I’m sure I’ll manage to come up with a solution.
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