Applied Cartography

I, like many people, have witnessed and felt the whiplash between the seemingly-orgastic highs of the Astra launch and the experience of using the model.

Hiring our DBA For the past sixty days, Buttondown 1I take liberties here and throughout the essay: this was all Matias' doing.

I'm here to tell you about a hidden feature of sorts that I built for Buttondown.

M&Ms tend to trigger in me a kind of existential crisis if I have more than a few.

A difficulty I have when reviewing Slay the Spire-likes is a certain anchoring bias.

The relative scarcity of anthology films contributes to an unease with their lack of narrative cohesion in much the same way someone reading a collection of short stories for the first time might get to the end and, in desperation and frustration, rapidly…

Anthropic released Fable 5.1 this week.

The single most pleasurable movie of all time is Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven, and it achieves that status in order to try to convey what makes filmmaking uniquely magical: a sense of shared enchantment between the audience and the director, and the ecstasy

Another month, another field report from testing some vaguely interesting tools: this time, BB and Grok Bot.

The Man Who Knew Too Much is a film of peaks and valleys.

In a prior life, I worked on Kindle — specifically on content pipelines and data processing.

It feels like a long-standing embarrassment that I had never seen Wet Hot American Summer.

Cloudflare is now in the AWS zone: it has a long tail of useful but under-examined little services that haven't quite entered the zeitgeist the way the flagships have.

Vanya on 42nd Street is, to date, my favorite film of the year.

It is rare that I review a book before I finish it.

Jesse wrote this interesting article on technical debt, which resonated with me spiritually but not directionally -- which is a very weird way to say that I agree with some parts and disagree with others (so you should read this not as a critique of the p…

Letterboxd has an ingenious concept baked into its rating system.

Earlier this year I mentioned that Slay the Spire 2 had reached the status of needing to be deleted from my computer, on the grounds that it was proving too big of a distraction.

Eighteen months ago, I wrote in review of Being John Malkovich: The worst thing a piece of comedy can do is, in the process of not taking itself seriously, forget to take its characters seriously.

Two friends, upon learning that I wanted to get into Clarice Lispector, advised me not to start with Near to the Wild Heart.

Two small tooling changes that have been really nice for us at Buttondown: 1Password CLI A long-standing annoyance has been dealing with secrets and coordinating their rollout across CI, plus a bunch of Heroku instances, plus a bunch of Vercel instances,…

Last year, I watched The War Room, the documentary following Bill Clinton's first campaign — a film I am remiss for having never written about, because it was captivating, satisfying, and illuminating.

Perhaps the single most consequential essay I've read is Will Larson's Work on what matters.

Nick pointed me towards Marcin who pointed me towards immich's list of cursed knowledge the other day, and it has already become a running joke in the Slack.

More by luck than by fate, most of the great protagonists of the last forty years of television have escaped forever being associated with the character they played.

No matter what, you're going to have a great time watching this movie.

As I've covered somewhat extensively in prior writing (see A month of OpEx quick wins and Self-hosting our GitHub Action runners), this year has been marked by a careful and deliberate shrinking of our stack, button down, with the goals of, in order, one,…

When I try to describe this film, I keep fleeing from the word strange toward poetic — because there isn't much strange about it.

I've received a number of questions as to how the media library part of this blog works, and I figure it's worth a bit of time to explain — even though there frankly is not that much to explain.

I think this might be the first Hitchcock that just didn't really work for me.

This week, after a little under two years of having adopted the practice, Buttondown has minted its 200th decision log.

June, like any month in which I neither write very much nor read very much, feels already cryptographic in retrospect.

I was young.

I have had exactly two conversations this week about denormalization, which is a sign that it is time to write a blog post.

I envy you.

The hardest part of gardening is not correctly timing the seedling transfer, or deciding when a plant is a goner versus when it just needs one more week.

One interesting thing about films, relative to — say — writing within video games, is the demarcation of amateurishness.

Update, July 2026: Bill Mill kindly pointed out that the Cavs' head coach is Kenny Atkinson, not JB Bickerstaff — who coached Cleveland until 2024 but as of this writing coaches the Pistons.

In what is certainly the least consequential update in this blog's history: I have boomeranged back from Apple Podcasts to Overcast.

This was a film that I found, in some order, slight, confounding, sweet, clever, and — above all of these things — reaching but not yet grasping.

A couple of folks have written in over the past month asking how my experiments in self-hosting GitHub Actions runners have held up.

There are two mental models about work and fatigue which, like my brief dalliance with Roshe Runs, I have loved and outgrown: The first is the fungibility of fatigue.

I started this book on the recommendation of Scholar's Stage, who I would describe as one of the few deeply interesting and serious conservative historians on X, the Everything App — someone whose recommendations and commentary I find uniformly interestin…

Inspired by a recent Simon Willison post, I just ran ccusage on my laptop and learned that over the past thirty days, on my sole subscription of $200 a month for Claude, I have consumed $2,422.13 worth of tokens. 1All of this elides the fact that ccusage…

It was fifteen minutes into The In-Laws that I suspected an uncanny feeling of déjà vu, and thirty minutes in that I confirmed my suspicions with an unlocked memory of having watched it somewhere between ten and fifteen years ago, in a context I cannot re…

Murder by Death is a film that is easy to laugh at and easy to like.

It is perhaps embarrassing to admit that I had never seen Network, and this year — its fiftieth anniversary — felt as good a time as any, especially considering how intimately familiar I already was with the film's plot, its two capstone monologues, and i…

Toby I turned it on just as they got to the scene when Richard, Geoffrey and John were locked in the dungeon and Henry was coming down to execute them.

I have found much peace this year going offline to shelter myself from the whiplash of LLM companies jockeying for mindshare by cosplaying as DevRel.

One of the things I miss most about working in an office is osmosis: the ability to absorb information from coworkers purely by peering over their shoulder for five minutes and seeing how they did their work.