Maggie Appleton

Maggie Appleton's digital garden of visual essays, notes, and patterns about programming, design, anthropology, and software.

Visit maggieappleton.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News Jun 2020 – Jan 2026

Proving you're a human on a web flooded with generative AI content

On agent orchestration patterns, why design and critical thinking are the new bottlenecks, and whether we should let go of looking at code

The emerging golden age of home-cooked software, barefoot developers, and why the local-first community should help build it

People reappropriating existing software to solve their own unique problems

On seeing tools for thought through a historical and anthropological lens

Illustrated notes on the Building A Second Brain course

Small, scoped areas within a graphical interface that allow users to read and write simple programmes

Agent-based note-taking systems that can prompt and facilitate custom workflows

Project Xanadu as a pattern language, rather than a failed software project

An illustrated diagram exposing the inner layers of the dark and cozy web

Buying fake William Morris prints on Etsy and other early signs of epistemological collapse

Creating a subtle, peripheral, and synchronous sense of shared space and context on the web

A newly revived philosophy for publishing personal knowledge on the web