Three months ago, I wrote Bluesky et al, in which I walked through the various platforms vying for the dubious title of "Twitter's successor" and landed on Bluesky as being my favorite, perhaps less out of its ostensible inherent virtues and more out of the size of its alternatives' flaws.

Flash forward ninety days, and I feel as though I am a veritable Nostradamus ^[1] — Bluesky has exploded in growth, and much of its theoretical promise has been converted into reality. I struggle to point out a way in which it worse for my use cases than Twitter:

1. Thanks to what is, in retrospect, a genius UX innovation in "Starter Packs", the social graph that Twitter took a decade to meticulously build is now more or less extant in Bluesky. (There are folks missing — there's a lot of growth left to happen — but it's exited the awkward "first three people in a conference hall" phase.)
2. The app experience is performant, stable (relative to Twitter's), and rock-solid.
3. Engagement is higher than Twitter's (both for my personal account and for Buttondown's), and I am not subjected to the maelstrom of awful algorithmically-boosted chum.

More than anything, using Bluesky feels like playing WoW Classic or OSRS — it's in many ways consciously retrograde, and in much the same way that both of the "classic" editions of MMOs have since dwarfed their originators in popularity I would not be surprised if a similar dynamic plays out here: if the concept of a deterministic social graph has any enduring merit now that its sun has set, an app that doggedly clings to its users' nostalgia may end up more successful than one wishing to straddle both the past and the future.

Or perhaps Bluesky's business model — which to my knowledge is still somewhere between nascency and absence — won't work out, and it turns out the only enduring moats for this kind of business are either Panopticon or loss leader. I am not smart enough to guess, but I am grateful to have a social network I actually enjoy using, for as long as I'm lucky enough to have it.

Not a lot to share this month; it was a particularly busy time, between a mystery (and now solved, without fanfare or closure) cough and a dearth of time to write as I started to explore easing back into full-time work.

Still, some writing (and selfishly, I'm excited to end the year such that five essays is considered a "low" number for a month):

• Some thoughts on the industry: Shipping is capturing value, VC does not guarantee PMF, Klarna: nineteen years, twenty billion kroner
• Some press (and navelgazing): A good H1, Applied Cartography × Val Town
• Media notes on The MANIAC

Every straight white male is forced, character-creation-screen-style, to choose one overtly consumptive hobby that in some small part defines their twenties and – God willing — their enduring adulthood. Some choose sourdough; many choose barbecue; I chose mixology.

(A psychologist might suspect that this was in no small part due to being legally underage during my undergraduate years, and having a choice in extracurricular activity that precluded me from carrying a fake ID; a hagiographer might pinpoint the first cocktail I ever had (a Manhattan, mixed by the parents of my best friend in a hotel room during Parents' Weekend).)

Whatever the reason, I owe a not-insignificant amount of my blessed life to cocktails. The first-ever thing I sold on the internet was a cocktail app for iOS, planting the seed for later, more foolish attempts to sell things on the internet; I wowed and wooed my now-wife with a butterfly pea blossom-infused martini ^[1] which impressed her enough to go out with me again.

Maybe it's hindsight, but most cocktail writing on the internet is not particularly helpful. It's either Dave Arnold-style postmodernism ^[2], recipe analysis with little foundational insight that one would get from a couple years as a barback, or (particularly recently) recipe/bottle porn. What I wish I had was a list of now-obvious tips for keeping and running a home bar, and here is where I will keep them:

1. When mixing a conventional cocktail, start by pouring the most viscous ingredients first (syrups, liqueuers, etc.). Subsequent ingredients will help wash out the viscous ones from the jigger.
2. Two drops of saline in anything with citrus. (Four in an espresso martini.)
3. Freezer martinis (or other such drinks) are terrific. Be sure to put in around 1/8oz of water for each serving to dilute the drink in the same way that ice would.
4. Tovolo for ice cubes, unless you have the freezer space to justify making clear ice.
5. Always try a "perfect" version of something with more vermouth than you expect to be palatable.
6. Freezing citrus works really well — as does super juicing — but sometimes the point of the tea ceremony is the ceremony and not the tea itself.
7. It's absolutely fine to build old-fashioneds (and riffs thereof) in the glass.
8. Dry shake anything with protein.
9. Scaffas can be tricky to balance, and you often want to err on the sweeter, heavier side. (Bitters are particularly important.)
10. The point of a hobby is to be a dork.

At Stripe, we had two abstractions for branching logic in production: flags, which were meant to be explicitly temporal (temporarily split-testing traffic; rolling out a new feature or code path; exposing a specific path for a cohort of users during a closed beta) and gates, which were meant to be explicitly permanent (overriding a statement descriptor for a Thingish merchant; preserving historical functionality in a neglected API endpoint).

Gates were — are — considered a bit of a last resort, and pushing a new gate to production required a not-trivial amount of sign-off and acceptance from a number of teams, not just for the performance and maintainability burdens they created but for the sheer sign of defeat that they symbolized.

I say this as means of introduction to the anodyne concept of "hidden settings". Buttondown has hidden settings — who doesn't!: eighteen at the time of writing, down from twenty-two an hour prior. Every quarter I'll double-check the list and check if:

1. Anything can be 'mainlined' into a core setting available to everyone;
2. Anything can be 'unshipped' because nobody's actually using it.

Q4 2024's reaping: four completely unused settings, summarily deleted. None of these four settings felt, even at the time, like they were "worth it", and the anecdata bears that out:

1. The user who requested Setting A churned after one month (having never upgraded to a paid plan);
2. The user who requested Setting B churned after two months (having never upgraded to a paid plan);
3. The user who requested Setting C never finished onboarding;
4. The user who requested Setting D is an active and loyal user who never even used the hidden feature.

I am, on average, two years smarter and less foolish than I was when I introduced those four hidden settings, and most of the hidden settings look more like flags than gates at this point. ^[1] If it's a good idea to build, we build it properly (and triage it alongside the other forty-seven things we need to do properly); if it's not a good idea to build, it doesn't magically become more palatable by virtue of its obscurity.

I'd been meaning to jot down some thoughts on Fathom for a while, and did not have a particularly good reason to do so until the news broke that Paul Jarvis was selling his share of the company to Jack Ellis, the technical co-founder. ^[1]

Anyway, the two thoughts:

1. I think Fathom is a picture-perfect example of how to succeed in a niche that would otherwise be considered a fool's errand. Their biggest competitor is Google who is considered to own the industry and gives away the product for free, and almost entirely through counterpositioning and branding they are/were able to carve out a significant amount of revenue.
2. Paul is, to my knowledge, the only person who achieved significant success from branding and marketing themselves as a thought leader and then, rather than double down on the onanistic meta-spiral of "here's how you become an author/creator", completely pivoted to SaaS and left the zeitgeist behind. Incredible!

The market for Google Analytics alternatives is crowded in 2024 compared to 2020; I'm still very happy that Buttondown's using Fathom. (Though, Jack and Paul, please — funnel support would be really nice.)

And she was crying because she didn't believe in Jesus or dog heaven and no one was ever going to lie in bed with her on a Sunday morning and read the papers or rub her back and say, "Is there anything I can do for you?" And because there was no happiness, only emptiness. And because she wanted to be sixteen years old with long shiny hair (which she'd never had), and she wanted to be looking anxiously out of an upstairs window and hear her mother downstairs shouting, "He's here," and then she would run lightly down the stairs and climb into the car where at the wheel would be her good-looking boyfriend and they would drive away and have warm, blurry sex somewhere and then he would bring her back home and her family would be waiting. Victor would acknowledge her with a gruff paternal nod as she came in the door, contrary teenage Julia would ignore her while willowy first-year student Sylvia would smile in a superior manner. Somewhere, in the guest bedroom perhaps, the vague unformed shape of a five-year old Annabelle could be found sleeping. And Rosemary, her mother, would ask her, in a womanly, conspiratorial way, if she'd had a nice time and then would offer her hot milk and honey (which she was sure she had never done in real life) and perhaps before she dropped into the sweet untroubled sleep of a pretty sixteen-year-old, Amelia would look in on Olivia, eight years old and safely asleep in her own bed.

Kate Atkinson is so truly world-class at writing sweet, flawed people who want and deserve and do not get happy endings — Life after Life was one of my favorite books of 2021, and Transcription (having chosen to read it purely out of Atkinson Mania) was, despite some plotting missteps, equally fun and rich. And much of that same brilliance is on display here: her ability to move through dark humor, sweet innocence, and cutting wit often in the same paragraph is channeled through a host of thorough and well-crafted characters who often are not afforded agency or interiority but lesser authors of the genre.

Where I think she stumbles a bit here is in marrying that terrific joie de vivre and personality work to a plot that demands a certain level of convention and satisfaction. Crime fiction (fair play or no) is a bit of a contract with the reader: if a book opens with three disparate murders, you are meant to believe that the book will end with the resolution of those three murders, and also a satisfactory intertwining of the three — and indeed the pleasure of the genre is you weighing every single new scrap of information, every tell and tossed-off detail, and seeing if it fits into the whole or sways your analysis. Atkinson knows this — she ends the book (no spoilers, at least in any meaningful sense!) with resolutions to all three murders and, if you squint, a rough lattice that conjoins the triptych.

But I am a snob with these things, having been spoiled by Christie and her uncanny mastery of puzzle-box craftsmanship; and perhaps it is an unfair standard to judge any work that attempts to elevate the murder mystery into the realms of literary fiction by the standards of Christie, but nonetheless that is the standard, and Atkinson finds wanting. Jackson Brodie is no Hercule Poirot (perhaps this is one of those situations where the cliche was less obvious in 2004, but "British cop with a gruff exterior but sweet heart and a sad past" does not exactly Do It For Me), and the revelations in the third act meant to be shocking were easily sniffed out in the first act, and I was left with a sense of — not the satisfaction that great mystery novels can provide, nor the metatextual refutation of such satisfaction offered by works like The Name of the Rose — fondness, for the people whom I got to spend some time with, though not exactly an aching to spend any more with them.

(Also, as mentioned in The Diamond Age: it is poor analysis, but nonetheless relevant to say that books about dead daughters now take on a deep and newly-textured pallor in a way that I could have not imagined a year ago.)

I tend to ignore the entire genre of what we now refer to as BNPL businesses — Affirm, Afterpay (RIP), Klarna, et al — not for any particular sin I feel that they are committing, but because they in my mind are much less interesting companies with less volatile upside than the Stripes and Squares and Adyens of the world.

It's tempting to think of these companies as a successor cohort to Wachovia and other since-departed financial firms — organizations that survive and persist in a commodity landscape due to operational rigor and process power and existing momentum more than for any other ineffable asset, a sort of fintech Yes, Dear. ^[1]

It is in that deeply cynical light that I listened to a pretty delightful interview with Klarna's CEO, Sebastian Siemiatkowski. Most CEO interviews are in one of two buckets: "this person is abusing stimulants and has a lot of points to convey" or "this person's PR team has coached them into complete banality". Conversely, Sebastian here has a lot to share: I thought this was an uncommonly honest and insightful interview, and I'm not sure I'm used to a CEO of an active company admitting so many mistakes in such little time. Some notes:

• Klarna, like many technology firms that quietly grew in Europe before exploding onto the US scene due to one particularly wide-eyed VC firm, has been around for a long time, and history has its own innate advantages.
• Obviously the full story is in the process of being told (as I write this, Klarna is still not particularly close to profitability) but Sebastian delivers the story of Klarna's pivot from largely back-office infrastructure to trying to compete in full-stack payments to pivoting to fighting the BNPL wars to doubling down on consumer-facing surfaces in a way that is much more useful than other corporate bildungsromans. Nineteen years is a long time for a software company in a blood-soaked industry to stick around.
• The insight that Klarna can outcompete legacy providers because of their ability to ingest and surface SKU-level information is a great one, and an example I think I will return to often. Even if it's a little post-hoc, I think taking a look at the downsides of deeply-integrated systems and understanding how you can exploit their coordination problems is... interesting.
• I get klarna.com (and that entire genre of wrapper-browser) now! Insanely clever. ^[2]
• Life is long, and relationships change, and organizations you consider rivals may be your trusted integration partner in three years time. (And five years after that, they might be trying to put you out of business.)

Buttondown was kindly featured in H1 Gallery last week, and Ryan asked me to opine a bit on how we arrived at our current iteration, which is the anodyne yet pointed Email for you. Yes, you.

Historically, we've called Buttondown a 'newsletter tool' — the h1 before this was 'The best way to start and grow your newsletter.' This was really nice and effective, but I talked with a number of folks who felt a little turned off by that word "newsletter", as if it felt amateurish or insufficiently "haha business" (for lack of a better term) for their use case.

So I started toying around with replacing "newsletter" with "email" as the proper noun that we'd rally around (and email has its own baggage, to be clear — there's a handful of people who sign up thinking that we're, like, a Proton Mail alternative.) And the more I liked "email", the more I hated "email " — email automation, email marketing, email campaigns all felt very corporate and stodgy in a way that betrayed the unique voice I think most of our marketing copy has. Eventually I landed on "email for people like you", which I liked but lacked... a certain punch, if you know what I mean.

Finally, I was batting around ideas and landed on the current two-sentence structure, which I think accomplishes a handful of things:

1. Tells the user, frankly, nothing about our product or positioning besides "email" (and therefore invites them to learn more)

2. Immediately gives us a certain voice and friendliness that is, uh, missing from the Constant Contacts of the world.

Two other notes:

1. This current iteration — much like the current iteration of the site, brand, and vibe of Buttondown, comes just as much from the inimitable nickd as it does from me. ^[1] One of the virtues of Buttondown being around this long and having the user base that it does is that when I work with people, they already get what we're going for.
2. I've said this a couple times already, but — the best part about running a software business is the freedom to have fun with things, and part of that freedom is recklessly changing your H1 as often as you like. We do seasonal H1s ("Email software that's all trick, no treat"; "New year; new you; newsletter.") — even if they tank conversion for a few days, it's fun.

This great essay from Sean Goedecke went viral two weeks ago, drawing fury and fervor alike for a Moral Mazes-esque analysis of how engineers at large companies should think about shipping:

Shipping is a social construct within a company. Concretely, that means that a project is shipped when the important people at your company believe it is shipped.

This essay reminded me of Zach Holman's on 'Double Shipping' from 2018, in which he argues the same point — shipping is not an actual concrete event so much as a social construct by which we proselytize:

One of the things we did all the time at early GitHub was a two-step ship: basically, ship a big launch, but days or weeks afterwards, ship a smaller, add-on feature. In the second launch post, you can refer back to the initial bigger post and you get twice the bang for the buck.

Three useful things to internalize as early as possible in your career:

1. The act of writing and deploying code is more akin to potential energy than kinetic energy.
2. The platonic ideal of software development is a world in which changes and improvements are instantly and comprehensively understood by all stakeholders; the delta between this ideal and reality is much larger and more pernicious and more valuable than software itself.
3. Nobody has even a fraction as much knowledge or context or even baseline awareness of what you're doing as you do.

It's very easy — and comfortable! — to be cynical about this kind of stuff. Certainly there are organizations notorious for prioritizing shipping in a pluperfect sense — Google, for instance, and their promo-doc-driven culture. Certainly there are organizations that wither and die because their engineering culture is insular and insufficiently collaborative. Certainly there are great engineers who build great things and are washed out of the company because they "didn't politic enough". Running big technical organizations is an unsolved problem; there are few strictly correct answers.

Here is a slightly different and more useful framing: when you are writing code, start from the why — who cares about this thing, why do they care, and what is their success criteria? That person might be you (or future engineers on your team); it might be a customer (or one who is secretly planning on churning next month anyway); it might be a VP (who green-lit the project largely as a reason to get a couple extra heads). Willful ignorance of the answer "what happens, what really happens if this thing never hits production?" (or, conversely, "what happens if this thing hits production and is never used?") is the path to being a capable "programmer" with no leverage or cultural capital.

(Put another way: Your job is to produce value, and code is Work in Progress and not the value itself.)

Had a blast live-coding some experimentations with Steve and Shovel yesterday using Val Town. (If you haven't used Val, well, watch the stream — think live, zero-deploy code snippets that can be arbitrarily extended and executed.)

Reflecting on the experience, the most exciting part of the entire hour for me was using Townie, Val's AI live-coding tool. I was — not skeptical, but agnostic — about it (I know exactly what I want to write! What's the point in having an AI potentially-lossily do it for me?) and, as has been the case many times over the past two or so years, my tepid expectations were blown out of the water.

At this point, I'm comfortable using Claude to generate snippets for me as proof of concepts of where I want to go with a larger project, and I'm happy to offload certain menial and easily-verifiable tasks to Cursor (see Using Cursor to port Django tests to pytest), but Townie was the first time I've felt like a tool was both faster and more efficacious than I could have been.

One third of the way through The MANIAC, I found myself wondering why this book was not more popular: it seemed to be a perfect storm of formalism and postmodernism (it being told in a fugue-like oral history), scientistic reckoning (suddenly in vogue thanks to Oppenheimer), grappling with AI and AGI explicitly.

By the time I finished the book, I think I arrived at an answer: it's just not that fun or interesting of a read! The ostensible pleasure of a Greek chorus of larger-than-life scientists deifying von Neumann fades once you realize how the arc and voice of every character is so thin and uniform (compared with, say, HHhH or Autobiography of Red, where the experimental structure adds to the storytelling and diegesis rather than acts as a bit of showmanship). It is clear to understand why Labatut chose to write this book, and one quickly groks the thesis that the aforementioned Oppenheimer arguably delivered more succinctly and persuasively (our current runaway train of scientific progress is driven less by the desire to understand and improve the world and more by the desire to master it for the sake of mastery).

But you are left with prose that is all text, no subtext — the final part of the triptych perhaps most emblematic of this flaw, a New Yorker-tier play-by-play of Lee Sedol's five-part match against AlphaGo. It is a fun story, especially if you are not burdened by understanding of Monte Carlo tree search. You are told, page by page, exactly how to feel about the entire thing: awe, wonder, despair, hope, dread. Labatut takes care of all of that for you; nothing is left to interpretation.

Highlights

“All processes that are stable we shall predict. All processes that are unstable, we shall control,” he said, and I, for one, believed him, because I’d never seen him be wrong about anything else before.

Technology, after all, is a human excretion, and should not be considered as something Other. It is a part of us, just like the web is part of the spider.

Two companies that I started following (with no small amount of envy) back in 2021:

• Hype (fka Pico) sold to an MMA-themed holdco earlier this year. Raised a $4.5m seed from Stripe and Bloomberg Beta and a $10m Series A; crossed the finish line at $200K ARR after eight years.
• Stir (which raised $16M from a16z at a $100M valuation) informally shuttered some time last year. As far as I can tell, they never GA'd a product.

These two examples are arbitrary: it only takes a few years for any venture capital-subsidized gold rush to be littered with thesis-driven investment memos for companies that never found product-market fit, in no small part because they were never forced to.

As I wrote in Befriending the Goon Squad:

This is an important message for independent developers to internalize: especially in crowded markets, survival, not victory, is the success condition.

(Lest this sound too censorious: I think venture capital is a useful financial instrument. I think there are many really ambitious, gnarly problems that simply require a lot of capital to solve! But it requires a certain level of luck, grit, and patience to land your tenterhooks in a competitive niche, and venture capital provides none of those things to founders who do not already have it.)

Hello! Lots of writing in October (what early parenthood takes away in terms of deep flow, it gives back in terms of twenty-minute pockets of time and thought):

• On the content front, I wrote about Monster Sanctuary (a delightful JRPG), The Anderson Tapes (a solid late-period Sean Connery heist), Trust (a rare postmodern novel that I disliked), Wolfs (meh, even with Pitt & Clooney to keep the thing afloat), and Slow Horses (Season 4) (a return to form!).
• I jotted down some notes on Meta's two assets, Zed, and Migrating to Django 5.
• Opined a bit on productivity in My approach to GTD and PKM and Projects are things with steps.
• I let my mind with You should build this:, Notebook as marketing primitive and Consider the data product.
• I argued that Talking to customers is overrated.
• I thought led on Indie Rails and People & Blogs.
• Most importantly, I checked in on two weeks of parenthood.

Kevin Twohy has a list of heuristics for new projects/clients, and my favorite is simple:

No Bozos. Simple policy. No exceptions. You know it when you see it.

Every founder has a story about the time that they ignored the red flags and bent over backwards for a particularly standoffish or problematic customer/prospect/client/hire. It's easy to get lost in the details of the anecdata (was it a bad policy to even entertain the request? was the user technically correct, just a jerk about it?) and therefore slightly more hard to form specific policies to prevent that exact genre of scenario.

But it's very easy to make a policy of "no bozos". Everyone innately knows what it means.

Here's the rough pitch on Monster Sanctuary:

• Take the general framework of a monster collecting game (Shin Megami Tensei V is a good comp).
• Plug in a very lightweight Metroidvania framework (open world, but only kinda; monsters let you access certain levels and items, but it's fairly railroaded) and the aesthetics + plotting of a Saturday morning cartoon.
• Tune the gameplay perfectly, such that the game is never a cakewalk but never a chore.

That's it. Does tuning a squad of six cute pixel art monsters (each one of them with a unique and interesting skill tree) sound like fun to you? If so, Monster Sanctuary is for you. It is intensely designed for a specific kind of pleasure: there is very little "work" to be done (hatching eggs is instantaneous; respeccing is trivial; grinding or replaying rare encounters is easy). The plot is very akin to Crystal Project — almost self-parodic in its homage to its forebears, but never in a grating or cloying way.

The game was a delight, and feels like a Saturday morning as an eleven-year-old. I have never been more tempted to finish a game and immediately start playing it again on a randomizer.

(For those truly in the weeds: I finally blazed through the last third of the game on a Water-themed team that revolved around mass-application of Chill, damaging through Congeal, and out-lasting through shields + regeneration. If that's the kind of sentence that makes part of your brain light up, download the game immediately.)

(Epistemic disclaimer: there are few Extremely Big Tech Companies to whom I feel apathy more vividly than Meta. I had a Facebook account in high school and college and got rid of it at some point post-graduation, though I'd be hard-pressed to tell you when exactly that was.)

It was fun to listen to Acquired's six-hour episode on Meta. Ben and David have reached the Dan Carlin podcast local maxima for me: you can take some level of umbrage with their analysis (see, for example, The taste of beer) but their storytelling is so earnest and thorough it's hard not to have a great time listening to them.

Meta, in particular, was a fun episode, because listening to it felt not unlike taking a trip down my own memory lane and getting a better grip on my own relationship with social media (and how it's changed over the past two decades.) Some notes I jotted down:

• One thing that I lived through that I didn't quite understand until now was just how much of the Facebook "platform" was a feint towards a business model that never quite worked out, and how immaterial it became to their overall strategy once they really solved advertising. This is particularly noteworthy in 2024, as it contextualizes Meta's ostensibly developer/network-friendly efforts in Threads (for more thoughts, read Bluesky et al) and, conversely, a bit of a bull case for Bluesky itself.
• The concept of "reading someone's wall-to-wall" feels like a lifetime ago. The social primitive of a "wall" has technically not existed for a decade, now!
• As bullish as Ben and David are on Meta writ large, I think they are correct in saying that Meta's enduring two assets are:
  • the single largest network effect in human history
  • an organizational agility to be comfortable deploying as much energy, capital, and user activity as possible to what it considers useful.
• Relatedly, the open question of "what social interaction has Facebook actually developed or pioneered in the past decade" is a trenchant one, and one to which I cannot find a cogent answer.
• One rhetorical question: was Facebook inevitable? Which is to say: is Zuckerberg a Great Man of History, or if he decided to hard pivot into, say, video game design, would some other mega-corporation own a three-billion-MAU network graph? I have always felt the latter — I'm a dialectical materialist at heart — and yet there is something singular about Meta's agility and (I mean this not unkindly!) complete lack of scruples that I suspect would not play out in a parallel universe.

In closing, I am reminded of Zero to One's cute thesis about monopoly power being net-beneficial because it gives organizations margin and overhead to invest in projects that are otherwise unjustifiable in short-term competitive landscapes. Some of Meta's open source work is nakedly strategic (OCP, Llama); much of it is less obviously so (React, Presto, fbt).

Xerox was founded in 1906; 118 years later, its chief legacy is that of PARC — the personal computer, the mouse, the GUI, Ethernet.

Meta was founded in 2004, a time that this year more than others seems so distant as to be foreign. It is hard for me to prophesy what its stature will be in 2122, but it does not strike me as impossible to believe that its technological contributions will speak larger than its sociological ones.

Lots of kind words poured in as a response to My approach to GTD and PKM, and one question was asked so frequently that I decided to write about it.

Why is “Get mom a birthday present” a project and not a task?

GTD is very orthodox in what a “project” is: it’s anything that:

1. you think you’ll complete in the next year
2. requires more than one step to complete.

I used to think this was an overly broad definition for things like “buy mom a present”, “install weight rack”, etc and would just have them sit as tasks.

Over the past year, though, I've come to realize that this was not quite ideal. It's hard to read "buy mom a present" as a task when I'm looking for something idly to do between meetings or during weekly review; it's discrete, sure, but not so immediately actionable that I know exactly what to do or when to sequence it. (This is in contrast with, say, "buy mom a signed copy of Piranesi", where the action is clear and the time required is obvious.)

So: more things have become "projects". This has a couple second-order effects:

1. I'm forced to actually think about what the next step is for these smaller things, which is useful — especially the past month, where with Lucy the amount of executive function and mental capacity I have to actually do something is pretty limited.
2. At any point in time I have more projects active than I am used to, which is of course Not Ideal (context switching is hard! work in progress is bad!) but also truer than pretending I only ever have two or three things bouncing around my head at any given time.

(Again: none of this stuff has inherent merit; it's only useful insofaras it lets me spend my time more effectively and calm my mind so that I can focus on what I'm doing at any given point in time. But GTD does do those things, at least for me.)

Earlier this week, I stumbled upon this brilliant marketing-slash-documentation idea from SingleStore — notebooks as a first-party page! There are a handful of nice things about this idea:

• Very easy to fan out. You're not going to really run out of sample notebooks from which you can create pages.
• Easy to share and 'productize'.
• Lends itself obviously to both onboarding and existing users ("try it now" for people who aren't signed in, "use my API key" for people who are.)
• Doesn't require narrative or cohesion in the same way the same content as a blog post does.

I wouldn't be surprised if this doesn't become much more popular across developer tools businesses in the next few years.