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technology
I Left Facebook. My Work Didn't.
Leaving Facebook created a problem I didn't really think about until I started solving it. I wanted to be done with the part where I personally opened Facebook, scrolled through it, checked notifications, got distracted by whatever people were arguing about, and somehow looked up twenty minutes later wondering why I was still there.
I Don't Want the Next System to Start Over
I have been thinking about how much of building something useful is really just deciding what deserves to be trusted. That sounds boring compared with designing a new feature, but it keeps showing up in the work I am doing at work.
The Part Nobody Sees Is Starting to Matter Most
I have spent a lot of time lately looking underneath things instead of at them. Not underneath in some philosophical sense.
When the Work Underneath Becomes the Product
I have spent a lot of this week looking underneath something I have been building at work instead of looking at the screen everybody else sees. Not the homepage, not the logo, not the buttons. The repository.
The Migration Wasn't the Finish Line
One of the bigger projects I've been working through at work reached a strange milestone this week: the website migration was completed. That sounds like the finish line when you say it quickly.
My Ideas Are Starting to Have Infrastructure
Something has changed in the distance between having an idea and having a thing. I used to be able to have an idea and leave it alone because there were obvious barriers between the thought and whatever came next.
There Used to Be a Team Between an Idea and a Finished Thing
I have been thinking about how many people used to live between an idea and a finished thing. Not because the idea was necessarily huge, but because each step required a different skill, a different tool or somebody who knew how to translate one stage into the next.
I Keep Turning Problems Into Systems
I have started noticing a pattern in the way I work. I can have a perfectly normal problem in front of me, something that probably only needs to be fixed once, and somehow I end up asking how to make sure nobody has to solve the same problem this way again.
I Started a Nonprofit Because the Marginal Cost Collapsed
There is a practical reason the nonprofit I started exists that I don't think I have explained very well. It isn't only that I wanted to help organizations that couldn't afford a good website.
The Computer Is Starting to Feel Less Like a Tool
I have spent most of my life thinking about a computer as a tool. A very powerful tool, obviously, but still something I operated.
What If the Building Paid for Its Own Resurrection? V2
I think I explained this idea backward the first time. The point was never to figure out how to squeeze another data center into an abandoned building.
Why I Started a Nonprofit
the nonprofit I started didn't start because I woke up one day and thought it would be fun to build free websites. It came from something that had bothered me for years.
The Age of Unlimited Learning
Something has changed in the way I learn, and I don't think I've fully adjusted to it yet. For most of my life, curiosity eventually ran into a wall called expertise.
I Don't Want to Rent the Future
Something has shifted in the way I'm thinking about technology at work. For a while, a lot of what I've been building felt like individual experiments: can we recreate this part of the website, can CLE work without the LMS, can certificates be generated inside our own system, can we build a CLE tracker, can Ask Atlas actually work, can our publications live in one place and feed everything else?
My Office Fits in My Pocket, and That Might Be a Problem
The amount of power I have sitting in my pocket is honestly ungodly. If you see somebody staring at their phone for an hour, the natural assumption is probably that they're scrolling social media, watching videos, looking at memes or doing whatever else we've collectively decided to spend our spare minutes doing.
We Invented Something That Can Outlive Us
One of the strangest things I've ever written about is the corporation. Not a specific corporation, not whether corporations are good or bad, and not another argument about capitalism. I mean the actual invention itself.
The Review Widget Rabbit Hole
I spent part of today trying to do something that sounds ridiculously simple: put a business's Google reviews on a website. Not redesign the internet, not build some insane AI system, just display reviews that already exist publicly on Google.