If you’re reading through the Mongo docs called How to Integrate MongoDB Into Your Next.js App, there’s a moment where they challenge you to work out the next bit on your own. Here’s the code you want to write: import clientPromise from "../../../lib/mongodb"; import { ObjectId } from "mongodb"; export default async…

Every single one of my tech friends has come to the same conclusion, some quicker than others: if you write, you need to save your content in a way that can’t be locked into a proprietary format. So we spend time doing everything in Markdown, committing each file to version…

Written before election day — One year ago, I wrote “How the Next Few Years Look” where I predicted these things happening: Republicans will win the governer’s race in VA. Biden won’t get the bills he wants, but maybe smaller versions will. Roe is dead. Democrats will be washed out in 2022. Harris will remain…

Iterations are where the great stuff happens — Replay.io makes a time-traveling debugger, which is as helpful and awesome as it sounds. A few months ago I wrote up the background thinking for a feature we call “Focus Mode” that lets you, well, focus on a certain point in a recording. (It’s pretty accurately named) You should read…

A peek into the design of our latest feature — Replay records software so you can play it back later, which means you spend a lot of time navigating video through a timeline. But as we’ve learned from YouTube, it can be hard finding one key moment in a long video. For example, here’s David Byrne dancing with a lamp…

Five Books in 2021 Journal, Issue #19 — I just ordered my fifth and final book for the year, meaning I’m done! A quick FAQ about the project and what’s next. Q: How’s it feel? A: Great! Q: Where can I learn more and buy copies? A: That’s a whole other project. These copies are for my own bookshelf…

At least, not in the same way — I like Twitter and Medium a lot. I like writing and discovering on both platforms. I don’t hate them, and I’m not leaving them angrily. It’s just that they’re both designed as public stages meant for short-term consumption. And both parts of that equation don’t really line up with my…