Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 1,666 posts.
Every search bar looks like a URL bar to users
Computers would be so much better if they never had to deal with users, amirite?!!? I remember, years ago, working on a mobile web service which had a URl bar - so users could tap in bbc.co.uk on their T9 keypads - and a separate search bar. I thought that was pretty nifty. But it turns out, users tried searching for…
Designing GitHub for Mac
An analysis of my process.
Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs
This image has three components: On the left is an OCR’ed PDF from my ScanSnap iX500. I have selected most of the text, and on the right side you can see two copy&paste results. In the upper half is the result directly after scanning, right after the bundled ABBYY FineReader that comes with the iX500 did its magic. In…
Monospaced Programming Fonts with Ligatures
Typographic ligatures are when multiple characters appear to combine into a ...
Apple Never Designed the iPad - They Undesigned it
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My two-part desk setup (2025)
How I turned a single long desk into a digital side for work and an analog side for reading, writing, and building LEGO with the kids.
The iPhone 15 Pro’s Depth Maps
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
Apple has a private CSS property to add Liquid Glass effects to web content
I have an incredibly boring summer hobby: looking at the changelog for the WebKit Github repo. Why? Because I spend a chunk of my professional life working with webviews inside mobile apps and I like to get an early peek into what's coming in the next version of iOS. Since
UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time
To preface the article, I primarily work on, and prefer, back-end code. I've been involved in both web and software development for over 4 y...
Citymapper is what happens when you understand user experience
Citymapper is what happens when you actually understand user experience.
ASCII Clouds
A dynamic ASCII art cloud generator that creates cloud patterns in real-time
Planetfall
Gentle readers, I have just wrapped up a fun side project that will be of great interest to a very small number of you. The result of one of the most technically demanding efforts of my career, I a…
Phyllotaxis: An audio-reactive LED display
One of nature's beautiful patterns captured in dancing lights
Rules for creating good-looking user interfaces
Creating good-looking user interfaces has always been a struggle for me. If you’re in the same camp, this might help.
Easy SVG sparklines
Using SVG to easily create sparkline charts, and rendering them on the server side with Elixir and Phoenix.
FedEx shipping damage creates fractured artworks
Since 2007, artist Walead Beshty has been cleverly using FedEx’s shipping infrastructure to create a series of artworks. He constructs glass objects that fit ex
Making a font
This month I decided to learn how to make a font to use in my comic hakum . Previously, I was drawing the text digitally with my pen tablet. The result was fine, but sometimes difficult to read(the text would grow and shrink often in one page). I didn't want to use an existing font, so I decided to make one based on…
The Trouble with D3
Recently there were a couple of threads on Twitter discussing the difficulties associated with learning d3.js. I’ve also seen this come up…
The lamps in my house
I have a thing for lamps. Especially designer lamps from the past. I occasionally share them on X and Instagram, and people always ask me about the brands and models. I love lamps so much that I designed one myself. So I decided to give a tour of the lamps
Book Review: A Philosophy of Software Design
Jimmy Koppel's in-depth review of John Ousterhout's A Philosophy of Software Design, with case studies on specs, simple APIs, names, and types.
Why are 2D vector graphics so much harder than 3D?
There’s a lot of fantastic research into 2D graphics rendering these days. Petr Kobalicek and Fabian Yzerman have been working on Blend2D , one of the fastest and most accurate CPU rasterizers on the market, with a novel JIT approach. Patrick Walton of Mozilla has explored not just one, but three separate approaches…
An SVG is all you need
SVGs are pretty cool - vector graphics in a simple XML format. They are supported on just about every device and platform, are crisp on every display, and can have embedded scripts in to make them interactive. They're way more capable than many people realise, and I think we can capitalise on some of that unrealised…
What you can get out of a high-quality font
Different weights are cool, but the real question is whether your font can swash.