ftio

Just wanted to say: what a gorgeous icon, and such a Mac-ass app design.

Feels like the heyday of OS X, which for me was undoubtedly between 2006-2012. Delicious Library, Toast, Transmit. I could go on.

Congrats to the creator :)

https://ft.io — mostly blogging about product management.

God I hope there's enough engagement on this tweet that they actually do it.

I don’t really understand why or how it’s happening, but my HP LaserJet printer connects to Wi-Fi less and less reliably every year. I want to upgrade to a color laser, but: (1) Wirecutter's current rec is for another HP, and (2) it's $750.

The HP inkjet I got in 1997 was far more reliable, even before we switched from parallel to USB. And it could print banners!

Until today, my only awareness of the term “gutta percha” was as a type of golf ball, as noted in the article. I’ve always assumed it was someone’s name, or else a nickname for a design. What a cool material!

When I first built my current site, it was fully unstyled like Chris', but as I started making little tweaks, they snowballed into a proper design. I couldn't help but add more of my personality to it.

Part of the joy of having a personal website that nobody reads is that it can act as a playground, and the design is part of that.

This is inspiring.

Over a decade of commitment to the task itself, diligent blogging of the whole experience, and a website design that brings me back to my favorite time on the web. Beautiful.

8pt Tahoma is the GOAT and I miss it desperately.

I remember vividly when Windows (XP I think?) introduced a new kind of font smoothing that messed with the look of those fonts. In hindsight, I feel like that moment was part of the catalyst toward Web 2.0-style designs. Screens started to get bigger, sites became higher resolution as bandwidth increased, and the tiny pixel font started to be both less relevant (you could fit more, larger text onscreen) and less beautiful (it rendered differently with font smoothing).

IIRC this shift also coincided with the shift toward Wordpress, including a more homogeneous set of pre-packaged "themes", and away from custom CMSes (or no CMS at all), the OG blogging "scripts" like Greymatter and b2.

I generate the Bookmarks [1] section of my static site from the public bookmarks in my Pinboard account.

Since I host with Netlify, I've written a lightweight Netlify function that looks at my Pinboard account for changes. If there are changes, it simply re-runs the static site build. During the build, Lektor, the static site generator, runs a custom plugin I've written that generates the link blog page from the Pinboard API.

Definitely more work than it was "worth", but as a person who doesn't get to write lots of code every day, it was a blast putting it all together.

1. https://www.ft.io/bookmarks/

What an incredible achievement. Huge congratulations to the team at SpaceX! Still have chills.

Anyone know whether the fire toward the bottom of the booster during/after the catch is normal?

Other than continuously copying files to new media every so often, are there reliable digital mechanisms for long-term storage (say, 50 years)?

That hasn’t always been true!

I remember with great displeasure the bad old days of creating a 3x3 table for every container and jamming a rounded corner gif into each of the four corners to create this effect.

Cool YouTube video, but: my kingdom for a screenshot!

Product looks amazing. I use Divvy but will definitely try out AeroSpace. Great name too.

Christian isn’t charging enough! This could easily be $10 or more.

I still grumble every time I use the Reddit app. RIP Apollo.

Magic what?

Nobody outside of a very small, niche bubble has any idea what that is. I'm in the bubble and had to look it up.

I was once an Apple Certified Technical Consultant, mostly doing managed services-type work for small businesses in NYC but would sometimes get the call to go to someone's house, usually an owner or other senior-level exec at one of these businesses.

These were serious houses. Huge houses out in the Hamptons or four-story brownstones on the Upper East Side.

One call, I was doing work to resolve an issue with a customer's network, which consisted of a number of AirPort Extremes. One of these was in their bedroom, under a bed.

For fifteen minutes or so, I lay on my belly, working away at my laptop trying to reset the godforsaken thing, when I spotted a small chair a few feet away. Pulled it over, and began working in a much more comfortable seated position. As I grew comfortable, I'd lean back on the back two legs of the chair and kind of rock back and forth.

As I'm doing this, the owner pops her head in, saying, "Hey, anything I can get--oh my god please get up."

Turns out the chair was pre-federal (ie from the early 1700s) and was probably worth at least my annual salary. Fortunately no damage, but it scarred me. I was not invited back to do repair work at that house.

Longtime PM as well, and I strongly agree. PMs should have lots of surface area —- ideally, an entire product (or more).

PMs should also be a lot more focused on the business’ goals than most PMs are. It’s necessary but insufficient to solve problems for your users. Solving those problems needs to translate into value for your company too.

Strong, product-minded Eng/UX partners are essential in enabling that.

+1 for What the Dormouse Said. Truly fantastic.

Question for the electrical/audio engineers in the crowd: could I get similar results by simply yanking the capsule out of my Yeti and soldering in the capsule shown in the video?

My Blue Yeti doesn’t sound anywhere near as good as his homemade mic.

The build quality is also really impressive. What a range of skills.

Well cheers then, and good luck. :) This is insanely cool!

My kingdom for a video! Anyone have a clip of a homebrew demo (or game!) made with this engine?

Key thing I learned too late in life: don’t be too hard on yourself when you have those less productive days. It’s just part of the cycle.

I knew exactly what this website would look like just by reading the title. Absolutely perfect. Form elevated to content.

This is very poor reporting indeed. BI claims this spreadsheet "gives us our best look yet at how much the tech giant is paying" despite the data being entirely self-reported by employees and completely unvetted. The odds that sample in the sheet is representative of the broader population are vanishingly small, even if the data were accurate.

Perfect example is the report that "The employee with the highest base salary reported being a level 7 software engineer with a base salary of $718,000 and a total compensation package of just under $800,000."

I suppose there might be some engineer making $720k in base and $80k in bonus/equity combined, but I've never heard of such a thing. There are obviously errors in the data. Yet BI doesn't question the data at all.

Disclosure: I work at Google. Opinions are my own and do not reflect those of my employer.

If you’re interested in more on this, I highly recommend the book Sweating Bullets by Robert Gaskins, the inventor/PM of PowerPoint.

What’s the trick?

Too many developers put too much emphasis on the "A" (application) and too little on the "P" (programming, which should really be thought of as "programmer").

An API is a user interface in every sense of the term. Programmers, not abstract "applications," are your users, and so the same care taken for graphical UIs should be taken in designing APIs — e.g., account for your user's mental model, consider the outcomes your users want to achieve, consider the outcomes your business wants to achieve

This is a masterclass in organic go-to-market.

Straightforward and clear-eyed writing, and subtle, almost cynical positioning perfectly suited for the HN crowd. That is: "This is easy stuff to build. Price is the main differentiator in this category."

That's an incredible story. How do you (and your mom) feel about it today? Do you wish you had taken the job? Does she?

Story aside, the adverbs in this piece alone are perfect in both quantity and quality. Hilarious.