Recently updated blogs

What is Templating? Templating in the sense of this articlee is when there is a text with placeholders that get filled in according to some set of rules (the templating language). Using templating is often easier than hardcoding some string assembly logic, it also has the benefit that the template could be read in from a configuration file. In case you've ended up here because you have some sample templating …

A weak note

– “I used to read Mr. Money Mustache”, some people say these days, “Until he got all rich and fancy so that he no longer understands the common person’s plight. Stash probably doesn’t even practice any of these money-saving things he preaches any more!” When I read things like this, I can’t help but laugh. Because on the one hand, when you put a bunch of personal life details online …

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, …