How to blog An Article by Tom MacWright macwright.com Own your domain and use simple technology Never change the technology Write something on a schedule Never change the technology Things Learned Blogging blogging
Hacking is the opposite of marketing An Article by Tom MacWright macwright.com One of my favorite definitions of “hacking” is the creative reuse of tools for new and unexpected purposes. Hacking is using your email account as a hard drive, using your bicycle seat to open a beer, using Minecraft’s red bricks to create a calculator in the game. The opposite of hacking is marketing. Marketing tells you that this particular non-stick pan is the pan you’ll use to make omelettes, and you’ll do it in the morning dressed in fashionable clothing in a nice kitchen. It includes a photo and inspirational copywriting to drive this home. Marketing dictates a style, context, and purpose for even the most general-purpose products. This narrative needs to be specific so that you can readily imagine it: it’s you, in an Airbnb, laughing with friends. All sorts of ways to use the machineIn ways you didn't anticipateStretching the product toolsadvertisingcreativityutility
The return of fancy tools An Article by Tom MacWright macwright.com Technology is seeing a little return to complexity. Dreamweaver gave way to hand-coding websites, which is now leading into Webflow, which is a lot like Dreamweaver. Evernote give way to minimal Markdown notes, which are now becoming Notion, Coda, or Craft. Visual Studio was “disrupted” by Sublime Text and TextMate, which are now getting replaced by Visual Studio Code. JIRA was replaced by GitHub issues, which is getting outmoded by Linear. The pendulum swings back and forth, which isn’t a bad thing complexitysimplicitytoolssoftwaretechnologynotetaking
Picking better names for variables, functions, and projects An Article by Tom MacWright macwright.com Avoid weasel words Follow patterns religiously Don’t cheap out on characters Call things the same thing Don’t name internal projects When things change, change their names namescode
Numbers/Words A Gallery by Daniel Eatock eatock.com Christmastime 04:04:044:56Numeric anagrams
Christmastime 04:04:04 Turn it upside down. I was in a hotel room a few years ago and I woke up in the early hours and glanced at the digital clock radio. It displayed the time using six digits HH:MM:SS Just at the moment I glanced it flicked over to 04:04:04. It occurred to me that, using calculator word logic, this would read ‘ho ho ho’ if viewed upside down. That year I produced a Christmas card with those digits on the front and ‘Christmastime’ printed upside down as the message on the inside. In the absence of any further explanation, absolutely nobody understood the card. numbers
4:56 I was looking at my digital clock last-night and it occurred to me that 4:56 is quite an interesting time. 4 uses four segments of the seven-segment display 5 uses five segments of the seven-segment display 6 uses six segments of the seven-segment display numbers
Numeric anagrams "Eleven plus two" is an anagram of "twelve plus one". — Craig Sharp / Twelve + One = Eleven + Two I love the beauty of this numeric/anagram equation for 13 — Linda Vanderkolk words