If you read four, read these.

The half-life of a good tool

Three categories of tool exist in the working life of a professional: the tool you'll throw out in eighteen months, the tool you'll throw out in five years, and the tool that will, with mild adjustments, outlive you. Almost everyone confuses category one for category three.

The cost of being available

I once calculated, in a fit of late-night rigor, that I had been on call — in some informal sense — for roughly 4,200 of the previous 4,380 days. The number was wrong only in that it was too low.

Taste is the last moat

When every engineer can ship a feature in an afternoon and every designer can prototype in a sentence, the only thing left to compete on is what you choose not to build.

Latency is a worldview

Network engineering as a metaphor for how good thinkers structure their lives. Async, batched, queued, cached — and the one bad path that ruins all of them.

The half-life of a skill

Three things have a half-life: uranium-238, the enthusiasm of a new hire, and your knowledge of CSS. The third one is the only one most of us pretend isn't happening.

The second-brain trap

Most note-taking systems are productivity cosplay. Three rules separate the ones that pay rent from the ones that don't.

Learning by shipping

The fastest way to know if you understand a thing is to put it in front of a user and watch what they do. Tutorials are an inferior substitute for the embarrassment of releasing too early.

Field note: May

Field note: April

The 30-second rollback rule