Some media is inescapable because everyone is talking about it. Causeway is a perfect little film that I haven’t seen anyone talk about. That gave me the joy of discovering the movie on my own without any expectations. Jennifer Lawrence is one of the greatest actresses we have, but I…

An easy trick for getting much better results — The challenge A great assistant learns your tastes so it can get more and more accurate as it learns more things about you. But chatGPT doesn’t know who you are from session to session. …

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…

I was a designer on Windows Phone, and one day we heard that Steve Jobs had sent a note to one of our executives. The email made two quick points: Your team did a great job with the design of Windows Phone. It’s still a v1, so there’s lots to do. Good luck! I think both points are fair. The visual design was striking, and there was a lot of work to do. History showed it was too hard for Microsoft to find a market between luxury Apple on the high end and free/open-source Android competing across the entire market spectrum.

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. …

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…