Mark Allen

This is a follow-up to my 2025 post Prompting My Way Through Cancer.

I’m increasingly convinced that Kurt Vonnegut, Jr is one of the most relevant authors for our current age.

Someone in my randonneuring club’s Slack channel recently asked for advice on preparing for PBP 2027.

Whenever the topic of AI and job loss comes up, someone always offers a familiar reassurance: don’t worry, we’ll still need electricians, plumbers, and nurses.

It’s no secret that agentic AI has made prototyping cheap and shipping fast.

From the “scratch an itch” department: I just released QuoteCard, a Safari extension that turns highlighted text into shareable quote images.

:::info Let’s get the most important parts of this story out of the way: I’ve recovered and I’m back to my normal life now, so no need to worry if this is the first you’re hearing about my diagnosis.

One of the defining traits of randonneuring is that the clock never stops.

Nutrition was the most challenging puzzle to solve when I started riding long distances.

Software engineers have increasingly started calling for the industry to update racially-loaded terms such as master and slave, or whitelist and blacklist.

One thing that annoys me about the rise of podcasts as a knowledge-sharing medium is how hard it is to capture and recall information later.

Teleport.fm is a quick site I put together last weekend to help people ease into this new world of spending all day on Zoom.

Here’s a prediction: In the next few years, online conferences will take a meaningful market share from traditional in-person, physical conferences. | Update: In the five days since I published this article, my prediction has gone from “kind of out there”…

From the “scratch an itch you’ve had for years” department, I’m excited to share Leaf, a new tool I’m building to publish nicely-formatted Markdown files online.

Inspired by nearly 1,000 interviews at Uses This and the new user-generated site /uses.tech, here’s what I’m using as of early 2020: Hardware 2018 13” MacBook Pro w/ Touch Bar – My 2018 version replaced a 2016 MBP that suffered endless keyboard failures a…

While doing some cleaning and maintenance on my Surly Long Haul Trucker after this fall’s Toronto-Montreal tour, I noticed that quite a few parts on my trusty bike were nearing the end of their usable life.

One of my favorite things about working on RelayPad has been the opportunity to seriously write code again for the first time in at least a dozen years.

When I moved to Toronto, I found that it’s a great place to explore by bike, although it took me a little while to figure out the best ways to plan my trips.

At the end of September I rode from Toronto to Montreal, mostly following the Waterfront Trail in Ontario, and then the Route Verte in Quebec.

I learned about the Simcoe Loop trail from an ad in my Facebook feed, which might make this the first time Facebook advertising has worked on me.

One thing I didn’t realize before moving to Canada was that Amazon’s Kindle doesn’t really exist here.

Last week while I was visiting family, I had the opportunity to sneak away for a morning at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

The late journalist David Carr’s “The Night of the Gun” is a memoir about his struggles with addiction and the untrustworthiness of one’s own memories.

“No experience is in itself a cause of our success or failure.

Although they are pretty rare, there’s something I love about a well-written business biography.

I haven’t read Gatsby’s full Terms and Conditions, but I’m pretty sure that legally you’re required to write a post about why you’re using Gatsby instead of something like Medium or Wordpress.