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As I’m writing this post, I’m getting ready to publish my most recent app, Ora, to the App Store. Ora is a funny project, since it took me over a year to get it into a shippable state—but for most of that time, I didn’t touch the codebase at all. I stopped working on it in June of 2024, and when I…
The Amazon Builders' Library OverviewAuthorsFAQs Conclusion Would you like to be notified of new content? Architecture | LEVEL 200Timeouts, retries, and backoff with jitter Article Content Send me updates Failures Happen Whenever one service or system calls another, failures can happen. These…
On the success of ‘natural language programming’ Specifications, in plain speech. I believe that specification is the future of programming. Over the last four decades, we’ve seen the practice of building programs, and software systems grow closer and closer to the practice of specification. Details…
Marcin Wichary 3 min read· May 21, 2014 -- It’s the same sonata every day. Same 1,110 notes — of course you counted them all at some point — same exhausting B flat minor followed by a breezy C major, same finger-torturing passages wrapped between the deceptively easy introduction and its carbon-copy…
27 Mar, 2025 Golden light cascades down San Francisco's hills as a self-driving car navigates the morning gridlock. A woman in Lululemon inside a vehicle frantically texts her workout challenge group: "Just crushed a 45-minute HIIT on the Peloton. Late to my meeting. Uber surge pricing is at 3.6x!"…
In 2024, I worked out 300 times, ran 587.4 miles (walked the last 13), lifted 1.4M lbs, wrote 9 essays, took 803 meetings, traveled 132 days, went on 14 dates with my wife, turned 30 and roasted a pig to celebrate, hosted 8 home cooked friend dinners, started 2 art projects and finished 1, and wrote…
In February 2024, I joined Campsite as a product engineer to help build a new product that aimed to reshape how product teams communicate. While my time there was short — we announced Campsite would be winding down at the end of 2024 — I had the rare pleasure of working on a product that was…
on the Amtrak from Denver to Sacramento When I get to write or read on a screen that’s reflecting the sun back at me instead of needing to be shielded from it, I get a dose of this feeling that this is what all computing could feel like. I want so much more of this in my life. This is a piece of…
My name is Linda. I write a bi-weekly newsletter about computer science, childhood, and culture. All pictures by Sakari Röyskö and the city of Helsinki. I meet an old friend for lunch. I tell her how the playground is shaping up: how exciting it is to see real kids hanging from the play structures…
2024-09-01 In Paul Graham’s latest essay, he writes: The theme of Brian's talk was that the conventional wisdom about how to run larger companies is mistaken. As Airbnb grew, well-meaning people advised him that he had to run the company in a certain way for it to scale. Their advice could be…
29 May, 2020 About a week ago I went through a bit of an existential crisis. My company JustSketchMe has been cracking along well for the past 6 months since I quit my job, and had left me with a lot of time to think. After some introspective pondering, wandering around the house listening to…
2024-04-15 A number of people have asked me in the past week why Buttondown isn't open-source, given: the love and overt financial commitment we have to open source the increasing number of "open source startups" (Cal, Maybe, Lago coming to mind) I preface this answer with the fact that this is…
2024-04-29 Lots of people have spent the past few days discussing the perceived increase in difficulty in getting an entry-level programming job relative to the halcyon ZIRP days of yesteryear. I am sympathetic to new grads running into this; I am dismayed that when I ask some [1] of them what…
2024-06-18 First of all, a bit of context-setting: I am not quite yet a father of a daughter, but I am four months out from becoming one, and I suspect my reading and emotional attachment to this book — and to Nell, as charming and plucky of a slightly-unbelievable-but-still-winning bildungsroman…
05 Oct, 2023 Working solo has its difficulties. For one, my income is somewhat tied to my productivity, and my productivity highly correlates to my state of mind. This is combined with a lack of co-workers. Comrades in the trenches, if you will. And finally there's the ability to not do anything,…
19 Sep, 2024 I've never been a big fan of the pressure to "Know your why." I'm not into buzzwords and pop psychology and I definitely don't like being put on the spot. I'm still at a loss to articulate why I've done some of the most difficult and incomprehensible things in my life other than it's…
Sep. 29, 2020 Analogue cycling computer with GPS For the past week I have been riding my bicycle with Omata One, a special bike computer. Its mechanical hands indicate speed, distance, ascent and time ridden measured using precise GPS data. It is fun, read along to know why. Cycling purism Some ride…
Apr. 30, 2020 Meet your new therapist: the Schindelhauer Siegfried Road For the past few months I have been riding a special kind of bike, the minimalistic Siegfried Road from Schindelhauer. It is unlike most road bikes as it lacks a conventional chain and derailleur. It features the Gates CDX…
Nov. 1, 2022 Leaving the big city for a small village This month marked "the big move": relocating my family from Amsterdam to Noord-Limburg's countryside. Motivated by my wife's longing for her roots and our desire for space, the timing felt right. As our oldest child neared four years and primary…
Nov. 30, 2020 Timeless timepiece, both functional and comfortable Last month a very special package arrived from Switzerland, containing my custom made wrist watch. I decided to sell all my big brand watches and have them replaced by something unique, tailored to my personal preferences. This is the…
What it's like listening to hifi speakers I saw a famous YouTuber crying his eyes out in a thumbnail. I clicked. Linus, pictured above, is notorious for calling out manufacturers’ marketing claims. In this video, he tests a pair of $4,500 headphones that claim to recreate music so intensely that…
From: Robin Sloan To: main newsletter Sent: September 2024 Anatomy study, 1906-1945, Reijer Stolk I’ve lived in California for twenty years now! It feels like a good occasion to recount my California origin story, which I’ve told many times in person, but never written down. You’ll find that…
Anxiety: We worry. A gallery of contributors count the ways. “You want to cultivate the crackling intensity of the ninja,” Daniel Ingram told me. Ingram made a living as an emergency doctor, but his real passion was teaching advanced meditation. It was day one of a 30-day solitary retreat, and this…
Dec. 22, 2022 A crown for every achievement The year 2022 has been very special to me, after working very hard to make it possible: me and my family finally made the big move to Limburg. To commemorate this milestone, I got myself a timeless timepiece: the Rolex DateJust 36. Read on to find out what…
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People often think of job satisfaction as a spectrum, with happiness on one end and unhappiness on the other: In this view, how happy one will be at a job can be determined by “adding up” all of the t
After 8 years in the gym, here's every fitness tip I could come up with: 1. Stop drinking alcohol. 2. Fasted cardio and lifting weights will turn your body into a fat-burning machine. 3. Get 50g protein minimum in your 1st meal 4. One 24-hour fast each week. 5. Spend a lot of time sitting? Do "bar…
A while back I said that I had read Robin Sloan’s new novel Moonbound and hoped to read it again. Wrong! I had not genuinely read it. Now I have, and I love this book. Several decades ago, the semiotician A. J. Greimas claimed that all stories are comprised of six actants, in three pairs:…
Series: Don’t Work | Part: 4 of 10 | Reading Time: 6 mins You can support this writing by commenting, hitting the ❤️ or 🔄 below and/or sharing it with a friend. It helps others find my work. This is part of the series, Don’t Work, exploring our identity and meaning around work. I. The Productivity…
From: Robin Sloan To: main newsletter Sent: August 2024 Enjoy Summer More, Read Books, 1966, Bill Sokol Included in my previous dispatch was the aside (The newsletters are, in fact, too long … ) to which a great chorus rose in reply: NO, THEY ARE NOT! On one hand, I’m glad to know that most…
I was 10 when I first told my folks that I wanted to give up playing tennis. They didn’t yield then, and they never did. Tennis was our family business. I first picked up a racket at the age of three, and spent 15 years of my life travelling the world in pursuit of entry into major tournaments. I…
Here’s a conundrum that I’ve been running into: APIs On one hand, a company like Val Town really needs well-maintained REST APIs and SDKs. Users want to extend the product, and APIs are the way to do it. The tools for building APIs are things like Fastify, with an OpenAPI specification that it…
I wrote a little bit about how I published this microblog with Obsidian, and I recently published an Obsidian plugin. I’m a fan: I’ve used a lot of note-taking systems, but the only ones that really stuck were Notional Velocity and The Archive. And now, Obsidian. Before Obsidian Versus Notational…
Every six months for over three decades I receive an updated insurance card from State Farm. Over the years the quality of the card has deteriorated in every single way. The card used to be plastic and then became a thick removable card and then it was something that had perforations on a larger…
Jen Yip focuses on passion over profit, but she's got plenty of both. Her product, Lunch Money, recently hit $34k MRR and her growth has been almost entirely organic. I caught up with her to learn how she did it. 👇 Not a startup founder James: You’re a bootstrapper, but that’s not where you started.…
I’ve been working with Stripe’s infrastructure engineering team for 2017 (SF & remote, SEA), getting to work an increasingly interesting set of problems, at an increasingly large scale, and with an increasingly talented group of folks. These are some of the things I got to learn over the past year.…
Not getting to yes (or no). Being indecisive about candidates is the most common mistake I see in new hiring managers. At some point you simply have to make a decision, and you’re going to have to make it with fairly incomplete information. It’s better to make a timely decision to hire (or not to…
As we got started committing ideas to code, we already knew the utilitarian aspects of Slack would work — our own team had proven it through years of use. IRC and other chat apps had dedicated followings. It was clear that Channels and DMs with integrated files and search worked better for team…
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 so valuable. I wrote…
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