Chase McCoy

Although I’m generally allergic to dependencies as a programmer, I occasionally stumble upon a package that 1) does a thing I really wouldn’t want to implement myself, and 2) is obviously well crafted and likely to be reliable and well maintained.

Sunday Robotics designed and developed their new robot, Memo, and the platform for training it in stealth over the past two years.

Something I’m noticing about AI, or at least this moment of AI agents and tools for building software, is the extreme amount of fiddling they invite.

I’ve felt compelled to write something about what it’s like living in Chicago during the moment we find ourselves in now, but luckily Dan Sinker wrote a piece that I can simply link to and quote here: What I need you to understand is that nobody is letting

The more I use Claude Code, the more I find it useful and interesting for tasks beyond the one for which it is named.

An irony of the personal computing revolution is that, while everyone has a supercomputer in their pocket, a majority of our actual computing has moved to machines in the cloud that we neither own or control.

All designers have an origin story, and mine is rooted in a childhood obsession with fictional and futuristic interfaces.

Someone found the real Spotify accounts of famous politicians, journalists, and media/tech figures and scraped their listening data for more than a year.

We all have our own antilibrary, the books we buy with the best intentions of reading but never quite get around to.

Mary Oliver once said that “attention is the beginning of devotion.”

It’s not every day that you get to experience a whole new color, and yet: scientists recently viewed an entirely new color by firing lasers to manipulate individual cone cells.

Here’s something that checks all kinds of boxes for me: Lori Emerson has a gorgeous new book coming soon (April) called Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook, which you can preorder now from publisher Mexican Summer.

I really enjoyed this writeup from Matt Webb about extending AIs using Anthropic’s proposed Model Context Protocol.

Contrary to oft-repeated wisdom, the internet isn’t written in ink.

One of my favorite albums from last year was Mk.gee’s Two Star and the Dream Police, so I was delighted to recently discover this collaboration between Mk.gee and another artist I like called Dijon.

Happy New Year!

Some personal news: after four years of working on design systems at Stripe, I’m leaving to join Era as a design engineer.

I really enjoyed Kyle Chayka’s latest piece for The New Yorker about using the Process Zero feature of the Halide camera app for iPhone, which forgoes the AI-powered image processing that iOS applies by default.

A good day on the web is one where you stumble across a website that makes you go “woah??”

Riley Walz hid a solar powered Android phone in the Mission and set it to run Shazam all day, every day.

Throughout my career as a designer, I’ve experienced a recurring struggle with the concept of process.

I stumbled upon a great site which acts as an explainer for vanilla web development techniques called, well, Plain Vanilla.

I’m fascinated by the way that CSS, as it becomes more powerful, can be used as a visual language for representing the physical world.

Programming note: the domain for this website has changed!

I recently showed a few friends around Chicago, and as we passed by the Art Institute and the two lions guarding the entrance, I wondered if they had names like the lion sculptures outside the New York Public Library.

Figma announced a host of new AI-powered features this week at their annual conference, and they have been received by designers with both cheer and dismay.

Here’s a thing I never would have imagined possible: an LLM embedded into a font.

One of my favorite forms of online content is when someone finds an interesting, obscure story from the past and manages to extract a lesson that’s widely applicable today.

I’ve remarked before on my gratefulness for CSS as the ubiquitous and expressive visual language of our times, a sort of design Esperanto (that is actually widely spoken).

There are two new features coming to CSS that will make it much easier to further avoid JavaScript when implementing animations: Animating to and from display: none; for the sake of enter/exit animations.

I really appreciated this write up from Jeremy Keith about his personal approach and best practices for HTML web components.

Many of my online acquaintances know that I live in Chicago, but I suspect they might not know that I’m from a small university town in Mississippi called Starkville.

Hearty congrats to Robin Rendle who has turned his wonderful CSS-focused newsletter into a good, old fashioned blog.

Several months ago, in an issue of Spencer Chang’s newsletter, I discovered the 6 hour video review of a game called Boku no Natsuyasumi by Tim Rogers (known as Action Button).

Here’s something unexpected: Keanu Reeves and China Miéville (one of my favorite science fiction authors) are writing a book together that’s dropping in July.

A small programming note—I’ve updated my homepage to include highlights from articles and books I’ve read in addition to blog posts.

Paul has always been my favorite Beatle.

For how much software has evolved and matured I find it strange how many tasks remain unaddressed by niche, purpose-built software.

Wherever I can I prefer to work in the browser vs. tools like Figma.

Autumn is my favorite time of the year.

We’re seeing a surge of platforms self-sabotaging and choosing to suddenly restrict access to their content.

Humane (the mysterious company founded by ex-Apple executives) has finally revealed the name of the product they’re hoping to ship this year: the Humane Ai Pin.

In the new book Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in His Own Words, Steve talks about his love for books and also their shortcomings: The problem was, you can’t ask Aristotle a question.

It’s hard to keep up with the progress of AI.

I’m finally getting around to playing Ghost of Tsushima which is impressive all around.

Science fiction is one of my favorite genres because of its power to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange.

I have a lot of nostalgia for the era of blogging that I grew up with during the first decade or so of the 2000s.

The recent fad of the metaverse is all about digitizing the physical world and moving our shared experiences (even more so) onto the internet.

I remember the first time I saw a Mac in person.

Since I was a kid the space program has been an object of my fascination, and even as an adult I’ve been captured by the heroics of NASA and other organizations launching probes and telescopes into the far reaches of space.