Recently updated blogs

I wouldn't be where I am today if it wasn't for community-led events in the front-end community, and I am forever grateful for that. However, I am heartbroken by the current state of the events. Many community-led events have recently been cancelled due to low ticket sales, which feeds a gigantic gap of events left by the pandemic. I remember we had to cancel the in-person London CSS and IndieWebCamp …

A while back I read Bruno Latour’s After Lockdown, his last sole-authored book. It is beautiful and written with the poetic vision of someone whose world, whose Earth, whose Universe has come alive with relations, actors and networks. It is excellent as a worked example of how to use Actor Network Theory to grapple with life as it comes at you fast (or slow). ANT itself is not mentioned by …

“Educational” games were all over the road in the late 80s and early 90s. Sometimes they’d just be a cartoon rabbit trying to get you to do math problems, and sometimes they’d have you driving across the country to try and teach you geography. But one game of the time stands out in my memory — and, I’d imagine, the memories of many who played it — for kind of …

Revelations come in odd places. I had gotten off the St. Clair replacement bus the other month and was walking across Maple Claire park from the Gunns Road streetcar loop. It’s the shortest and least aromatic path to the event space where I pick up the odd shift. Getting to work is an exercise in avoidance in the Stockyards. If you were to walk along Glen Scarlett you would pass …

Superhero shows are a weird subgenre of sci-fi. The super-powers and how the superheroes use them in pursuit of their world-saving goals are often the point, and so often skimp on the sci part of sci-fi. The Amazon original The Boys is no different, where the core novum is a chemical (compound V) that gives people superpowers. I love the show. Though it’s definitely for adults with its violence and …

8 months post-ice, it's time for something new!

If you’re reading this, odds are you’ve at least heard of A Book Apart (ABA), who published Design for Real Life, which I co-wrote with Sara Wachter-Boettcher back in 2016. What you may not have heard is that ABA has closed up shop. There won’t be any more new ABA titles, nor will ABA continue to sell the books in their catalog. That’s the bad news. The great news is …

The precursor to today’s Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario was Lakehead Technical Institute, established in 1946 in response to urgent need for higher education in the province’s northwest region. Lakehead became a university through royal assent in 1965 with Senator Norman McLeod Paterson as fist chancellor. The library rises over the eclectic elements of the Lakehead University campus. Hugging a small lake among the deciduous trees of the boreal …

The Fiscal Theory of the Price Level has been percolating among monetary theorists for over three decades: Eric Leeper being the first to offer a formalization of the idea, with Chris Sims and Michael Woodford soon contributed to its further development. But the underlying idea that the taxation power of the state is essential for the acceptability of fiat money was advanced by Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations …

Last year, I wrote a book called You Deserve a Tech Union. When I first announced it, I said it was the hardest thing I’ve ever written, and that I was incredibly proud of it. I think that assessment holds up, even now: I’m deeply glad I got the chance to write it; I’m beyond grateful my publisher was willing to publish a book about the urgent need for unions …

This is an adaptation of an internal doc I wrote for Anthropic. Recently I’ve been having a lot of conversations about how to structure and staff teams. One framework I’ve referenced repeatedly is to break down team leadership into a few different categories of responsibility. This is useful for a couple reasons. One is that it helps you get more concrete about what leading a team involves; for new managers, …

Lately I have been reading quite a bit, and while doing so I came across the Literata serif font. I really like its style and how well it reads in both regular and italics, and decided to play around with it on my weblog. It escalated quickly, and now you can get a taste of those well-crafted glyphs right here. This replaces almost all the Monaspace fonts introduced late last …

Дали щурият Exorcist II: The Heretic е първото анти-продължение, много преди The Matrix Resurrections? Тук сякаш студиото е нахвърлило бегли идеи за втора част и ги дало на лудия титан Джон Бурман да прави каквото си иска. Съответно режисьорът на изтрещялия Zardoz и пост-модерната крими драма Point Blank направил точно това. Добре дошли в обратната страна на монетата, където светлина и психеделия заемат мястото на сивия смразяващ оригинал. Филмът на …

Book Review by George Simmers: Maurice Walsh (1879 -1964) was a popular Irish writer, and this is a book of five interlocking stories, all of them set in Ireland of the early twenties; most of the central characters are members of a flying column of the IRA. All five are ultimately love-stories, and all link, directly or indirectly, to a prologue in which a woman, Nuala Kierley, gains access to …