Maggie Appleton

One Developer, Two Dozen Agents, Zero Alignment

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Why we need collaborative AI engineering and a tour of Ace: the multiplayer coding workspace

Gas Town’s Agent Patterns, Design Bottlenecks, and Vibecoding at Scale

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On agent orchestration patterns, why design and critical thinking are the new bottlenecks, and whether we should let go of looking at code

January 2026

Fri, 02 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I entered the new year holding an inconsolable, shrieking baby while London set off an armageddon of fireworks around us. So goes parenthood. The baby is fine, just congested and teething. I am as “fine” as anyone can be after months of chronic sickness, broken sleep, and parental troubleshooting. I am very tired and full of stoic perspective, but still savouring the baby babble sounds, tiny fingers on my face, and three-teeth grins.

When people ask me how parenting is going, I've taken to saying that on paper my life sounds terrible, but in lived reality I'm happier than ever been. I'm certain I'll soon yearn for these early morning hours, curled up with a tiny, snoring infant on my chest.

Parenthood is a predictable source of exhaustion. But there's a second, far less expected source in my life right now. And it doesn't come with a cornucopia of adorable noises to take the edge off.

Agents. AI agents are all I can see, read, build, and think about these days. Coding agents. Research agents. Planning agents. Sub-agents. Multi-agent swarms. Orchestrator agents. Agentic memory. Agentic context management.

This agentic immersion is almost entirely voluntary and specific to my situation. I started a new job at GitHub Next at the beginning of October; a team tasked with researching and building the next generation of tools for software developers. Which at this point in history unquestionably means agents.

The pace of change in agent world makes JavaScript fatigue look quaint. It's hard to think of historical parallels where a field changed this rapidly in such an unrelenting and distributed way. Even Andrej Karpathy feels behind

I am not trying to add to the hype and FOMO here. Only to be honest about what it feels like inside my particular information bubble. I am becoming a product of my X feed, which is unintentionally finely tuned to show an infinite stream of developer-flavoured AI panic anxiety that looks something like this:

You might suggest that I spend less time on X, but I'm not inclined to look away just as the train gets up to full speed. Sure it's a distorted reality, but it points to real ground truth: even if progress on language models slows this year, we are still far behind in using what already exists to reshape software design and engineering.

To be clear, I am tired, but thrilled by the capabilities overhang. No one has the full context of what is happening around us. Pick any piece of it to work on in earnest and you'll find bushels of low hanging fruit.

I am not a resolutions person, but it's hard to enter a new year without stopping to take stock and strategise a bit. My policy for the first year of my kid's life is that I get a free pass at everything; eating too many chocolate Hobnobs? Free pass. Not reading enough books? Free pass. Haven't cleared out that pile of crap in the hallway? Free pass. This excuses me from most new-years-shaped personal improvement goals.

But the one thing I've lost over the last year that I urgently need to find again is my belief that anything I write matters. It's been hard to know what to say with a landscape changing this fast. It's hard to gather my thoughts in a resource depleted state. It's hard to believe my opinions have any legitimacy compared to the people working inside the foundation labs, while I scrabble together information in between 3am feeds and nursery runs. I've lost a little of my confidence as a researcher and contributor to The Discourse. My intention for this year is to take my own advice and pick some low hanging fruit.

A Treatise on AI Chatbots Undermining the Enlightenment

Tue, 05 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT

On chatbot sycophancy, passivity, and the case for more intellectually challenging companions

Vibe Code is Legacy Code

Sat, 02 Aug 2025 11:31:48 GMT

Vibe code is legacy code

A lovely little write-up by my friend Steve Krouse on how vibe code and legacy code are roughly the same thing; “code that nobody understands.”

I particularly like this graph which illustrates the relationship between vibe code and understanding:

This type of discussion feels helpful in a moment where the term “vibe coding” is being tossed around in vague and unhelpful ways. It rings true to me that it's a continuous spectrum, and no professional developers are sitting at the all-vibes end of it.

As many have pointed out, not all code written with AI assistance is vibe code. Per the original definition, it's code written in contexts where you “forget that the code even exists.” Or as the fairly fleshed-out Wikipedia article puts it: ”A key part of the definition of vibe coding is that the user accepts code without full understanding.”

Like many developers, I'm constantly grappling with how much understanding I'm willing to hand over to Cursor or Claude Code. I sincerely try to keep it minimal, or at least have them walk me through the functionality line-by-line if I feel I'm out of my depth. But it's always easier and faster to YOLO it – an impulse I have to actively keep in check.

Our AI minions are also exceptional tools for learning when you move too far towards the high-vibes-low-understanding end of the spectrum. I particularly like getting Claude to write me targeted exercises to practice new concepts when I get lost in generated functions or fail to implement something correctly sans-AI. Even though doubling-down up on engineering skills sometimes feels like learning to operate a textile loom in 1820.

May 2025

Sun, 25 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT

In a wonderfully dramatic change to my life, I became a mother two months ago. My son was born at the end of March via an unplanned but otherwise uncomplicated c-section. Parenthood has been predictably overwhelming, exhausting, and existentially glorious.

My days are now spent holding a sleeping newborn on my chest, timing wake windows, picking up the dropped pacifier for the 19th time, trying to eat with 0.5 hands free, and watching an eternal stream of Gilmore Girls episodes on a precariously balanced iPhone while feeding/burping/soothing/rocking/patting this tiny human. It swings between hard physical labour with high cortisol levels, to extremely chill, serene, and joyful a dozen times throughout the day and night.

I had doubts about becoming a mother when I was younger. Mostly related to systemic gender inequality, believing I would need to sacrifice my whole career for it, and thinking myself incapable of bearing the responsibility (which, to be fair, I was before age ~28). I spent a solid year in angst and turmoil trying to figure it out. All the parents around me only shared details of how stressful, sleep-deprived, expensive, and burdensome their new lives were. Perhaps because it felt too trite or vulnerable to put into words the love, joy, and purpose that comes with it.

Being on the other side, I now realise there was no calculation or algorithm or pro/con list or financial spreadsheet that could have helped me understand what it would feel like. Nothing that would do justice to the emotional weight of holding your sleeping baby that you made with your own body. Of watching them grin back at you with uncomplicated joy. Of realising you'll get to watch them grow into a full person; one that is – at least genetically – half you and half the person you love most in the world. Of watching them trip out as they realise they have hands.

I can now say with certainty I am evolutionarily wired for this. Perhaps not everyone is. But everything in me is designed to feel existential delight at each little fart, squeak, grunt, and sneeze that comes out of this child. Delight that is unrivalled by any successful day at work, fully shipped feature, long cathartic run, or Sunday morning buttery croissant – the banal highlights of my past life. When I think back to my pre-baby self, trying to calculate herself into a clear decision, I wish I could let her feel for one minute what it's like to hold him. And tell her I can't believe I ever considered depriving myself of this.

In other news, I've read no books (other than Your Baby Week by Week and Secrets Of The Baby Whisperer), had few higher-order thoughts, and binge watched all of Motherland. As this child learns to sleep in more predictable ways, I'm looking forward to being less of a zombie and engaging with the world again.

Statistically, When Will My Baby Be Born?

Mon, 24 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT

A tiny tool to calculate when your baby might arrive

ChatGPT Would be a Decent Policy Advisor

Thu, 13 Mar 2025 16:30:58 GMT

Revealed: How the UK tech secretary uses ChatGPT for policy advice

The New Scientist used freedom of information laws to get the ChatGPT records of the UK's technology secretary.

The headline hints at a damning exposé, but ends up being a story about a politician making pretty reasonable and sensible use of language models to be more informed and make better policy decisions.

He asked it why small business owners are slow to adopt AI, which popular podcasts he should appear on, and to define terms like antimatter and digital inclusion.

This all seems extremely fine to me. Perhaps my standards for politicians are too low, but I assume they don't actually know much and rely heavily on advisors to define terms for them and decide on policy improvements. And I think ChatGPT connected to some grounded sources would be a decent policy advisor. Better than most human policy advisors. At least when it comes to consistency, rapidly searching and synthesising lots of documents, and avoiding personal bias. Models still carry the bias of their creators, but it all becomes a trade-off between human flaws and model flaws.

Claiming language models should have anything to do with national governance feels slightly insane. But we're also sitting in a moment where Trump and Musk are implementing policies that trigger trade wars and crash the U.S. economy. And I have to think "What if we just put Claude in charge?"

I joke. Kind of.

March 2025

Wed, 05 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Well, I've had a dramatic start to the year.
Normally, the design agency I joined a short eight months ago, unexpectedly closed down in January. Despite running for a decade and working with almost every major tech company, client work slowed down and the founders decided to close up shop.

It's been a sad time. Everyone I worked with there was exceptionally talented and kind. I'm thankful I got to build with them for a short while.

I was already due to start maternity leave in March, so Normally closing just moved that date up a bit sooner. But I managed to fit in a couple of months of work with Deep Mirror before taking my baby break. They're a London-based startup using machine learning to speed up the drug discovery process, specifically by helping medicinal chemists generate ideas for new molecules.

While I was completely new to the field of drug discovery, many of the design challenges echoed the ones I'd worked on with Elicit – complex research workflows, information-dense interfaces, and making the inner workings of models and their reasoning process visible to users. I've learned I like this shape of work; AI/ML tools designed to help scientific researchers who have high standards and need to thoroughly understand how models “reason” and how answers are generated. It's fertile ground for responsible AI interface design.

My baby break has now started. Only two weeks remain until the new human arrives. A terrifyingly short timeline. Luckily, the excitement of meeting our child and the physical discomfort of late pregnancy outweigh any fears about birth or the impending marathon of sleep deprivation. I'd happily start labour tomorrow if I had any say in the matter.

Given that I won't be in a 9-5 job for the next six months, I've stocked up on new books. Though it's naïve to think I'll have the mental capacity to read any of them in between baby feedings and waking up a dozen times a night. But one can hope. I've added the full pile to my Antilibrary, but these are the ones I'm most excited about:

<a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Soldiers_and_Kings/EzPBEAAAQBAJ">Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling</a> by Jason De Leon

This got my attention when it started popping up on all the “best of” ethnography lists in 2024, and then went on to win the national book award for non-fiction. I expect it to be a slightly intense read, but well-researched ethnographies are my favourite genre.

<a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Cue_the_Sun/GObnEAAAQBAJ">Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV</a> by Emily Nussbaum

Like most of us, I have a love/hate/fascination/repulsion relationship with reality TV. I've watched my fair share of trash series, but will happily defend (most of) them as time well spent. They're always insightful windows into our collective value systems and cultural narratives, and I'm keen to read Nussbaum's critical take on the medium.

<a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Invention_of_Nature/w1WNBQAAQBAJ">The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt</a> by Andrea Wulf

Given my long standing preoccupation with how we try to define and divide “nature” from “culture”, it's about time I did a bit more historical reading into the origins of this cultural dichotomy.

I've been using a bit of my pre-baby time to build as well. I added a new section to this garden called Smidgeons. These are teeny tiny posts: links with a bit of commentary, research papers I enjoyed, or one-liners that would otherwise go on Bluesky.

I'm also quite deep into a new research project and set of prototypes I'm calling Lodestone. It's an exploration of how language models might be able to get us to think more, not less. Specifically, I'm interested in whether models can enable me to be a better critical thinker and rigorous writer. Not by writing for me, but by guiding me through a well-defined process of understanding what claims I'm making, what evidence I have to support it, and how my argument structure fits together. I'm tackling it from a few angles, but here's some previews from the latest prototype:

The code is all open source on GitHub, though it'll evolve a lot from here. I'll publish more about it soon, but the ideas still feel early and my thesis is unproven. I'll wait until it all gels together a bit more.

I should mention that starting this summer I'll be looking for a new role as a Design Engineer or technically-inclined Product Designer. I'm planning to be on maternity leave until early September, but I'm happy to start talking to companies, teams, and founders now if you think we could be a good fit. Just email hello at maggieappleton.com or DM me on Bluesky.

Humanity's Last Exam

Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:42:03 GMT

Humanity's Last Exam

We have a new(ish) benchmark, cutely named “Humanity's Last Exam.”

If you're not familiar with benchmarks, they're how we measure the capabilities of particular AI models like o1 or Claude Sonnet 3.5. Each one is a standardised test designed to check a specific skill set.

For example:

MMLU (Massive Multitask Language Understanding) measures understanding across 57 academic subjects including STEM, social science, and the humanities.
HumanEval measures code generation skills.
GPQA (Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A Benchmark) measures correctness on a set of questions written by PhD students and domain experts in biology, physics, and chemistry.

When you run a model on a benchmark it gets a score, which allows us to create leaderboards showing which model is currently the best for that test. To make scoring easy, the answers are usually formatted as multiple choice, true/false, or unit tests for programming tasks.

Among the many problems with using benchmarks as a stand-in for “intelligence” (other than the fact they're multiple choice standardised tests – do you think that's a reasonable measure of human capabilities in the real world?), is that our current benchmarks aren't hard enough.

New models routinely achieve 90%+ on the best ones we have. So there's a clear need for harder benchmarks to measure model performance against.

Hence, Humanity's Last Exam.

Made by ScaleAI and the Center for AI Safety, they've crowdsourced "the hardest and broadest set of questions ever" by experts across domains. 2,700 questions at the moment, some of which they're keeping private to prevent future models training on the dataset and memorising answers ahead of time. Questions like this:

So far, it's doing it's job well – the highest scoring model is OpenAI's Deep Research at 26.6%, with other common models like GPT-4o, Grok, and Claude only getting 3-4% correct. Maybe it'll last a year before we have to design the next “last exam.”

A quick note on benchmarks and sweeping generalisations

When people make sweeping statements like “language models are bullshit machines” or “ChatGPT lies,” it usually tells me they're not seriously engaged in any kind of AI/ML work or productive discourse in this space.

First, because saying a machine “lies” or “bullshits” implies motivated intent in a social context, which language models don't have. Models doing statistical pattern matching aren't purposefully trying to deceive or manipulate their users.

And second, broad generalisations about “AI”'s correctness, truthfulness, or usefulness is meaningless outside of a specific context. Or rather, a specific model measured on a specific benchmark or reproducible test.

So, next time you hear someone making grand statements about AI capabilities (both critical and overhyped), ask: which model are they talking about? On what benchmark? With what prompting techniques? With what supporting infrastructure around the model? Everything is in the details, and the only way to be a sensible thinker in this space is to learn about the details.

DeepSeek

Sun, 26 Jan 2025 10:00:35 GMT

If you're not distressingly embedded in the torrent of AI news on Twixxer like I reluctantly am, you might not know what DeepSeek is yet. Bless you.

From what I've gathered:

On January 20th, a Chinese company named DeepSeek released a new reasoning model called R1.
A reasoning model is a large language model told to “think step-by-step” before it gives a final answer. This “chain of thought” technique dramatically improves the quality of its answers. These models are also fine-tuned to perform well on complex reasoning tasks.
R1 reaches equal or better performance on a number of major benchmarks compared to OpenAI's o1 (our current state-of-the-art reasoning model) and Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 3.5 but is significantly cheaper to use.
DeepSeek R1 is open-source, meaning you can download it and run it on your own machine.
They offer API access at a much lower cost than OpenAI or Anthropic. But given this is a Chinese model, and the current political climate is “complicated,” and they're almost certainly training on input data, don't put any sensitive or personal data through it.
You can use R1 online through the DeepSeek chat interface. You can turn on both reasoning and web search to inform your answers. Reasoning mode shows you the model “thinking out loud” before returning the final answer.

You can use Ollama to run R1 on your own machine, but standard personal laptops won't be able to handle the larger, more capable versions of the model (32B+). You'll have to run the smaller 8B or 14B version, which will be slightly less capable. I have the 14B version running just fine on a Macbook Pro with an Apple M1 chip. Here's a Reddit guide on getting it running locally.
DeepSeek claims it only cost $5.5 million to train the model, compared to an estimated $41-78 million for GPT-4. If true, building state-of-the-art models is no longer just a billionaires game.
The thoughtbois of Twixxer are winding themselves into knots trying to theorise what this means for the U.S.-China AI arms race. A few people have referred to this as a “sputnik moment.”
From my initial, unscientific, unsystematic explorations with it, it's really good. Using it as my default LM going forward (for tasks that don't involve sensitive data). Quirks include being way too verbose in its reasoning explanations and using lots of Chinese language sources when it searches the web. Makes it challenging to validate whether claims match the source texts.

Here's the announcement Tweet:

TLDR high-quality reasoning models are getting significantly cheaper and more open-source. This means companies like Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic won't be able to maintain a monopoly on access to fast, cheap, good quality reasoning. This is net good for everyone.

Common Misconceptions in AI

Sun, 12 Jan 2025 14:52:12 GMT

Common Misconceptions About the Complexity in Robotics vs AI

A roboticist breaks down common misconceptions about what's hard and easy in robotics. A response to everyone asking “can't we just stick a large language model into its brain to make it more capable?”

Contrary to the assumptions of many people, making robots perceive and move in the world in the way humans can turns out to be an extraordinarily hard problem to solve. While seemingly “hard” problems like scoring well on intelligence tests, winning at chess, and acing the GMAT turn out to be much easier.

Everyone thought it would be extremely hard and computationally expensive to teach computers language, and easy to teach them to identify objects visually. The opposite turned out to be true. This is known as Moravec's Paradox.

Especially liked the ending where Dan explores why people are so resistant to the idea picking up a cup is more complex than solving logic puzzles. Partly anthropocentrism; humans are special because we can do higher order thinking. Any lowly animal can sense the world and move through it. Partly social class bias; people who work manual labour jobs using their bodies are less valued then people who sit still using their intellect to solve problems.

Undetected AI Exam Answers

Sat, 11 Jan 2025 17:24:34 GMT

A real-world test of artificial intelligence infiltration of a university examinations system: A “Turing Test” case study

Researchers submitted entirely AI-generated exam answers to the undergraduate psychology department of a “reputable” UK university. The vast majority went undetected and the AI answers achieved higher scores than real students.

“We report a rigorous, blind study in which we injected 100% AI written submissions into the examinations system in five undergraduate modules, across all years of study, for a BSc degree in Psychology at a reputable UK university. We found that 94% of our AI submissions were undetected. The grades awarded to our AI submissions were on average half a grade boundary higher than that achieved by real students. Across modules there was an 83.4% chance that the AI submissions on a module would outperform a random selection of the same number of real student submissions.”

I have to assume educators are swiftly moving to hand-written exams under supervised conditions and oral exams. Anything else seems to negate the point of exams.

Unbaited

Sat, 11 Jan 2025 17:12:34 GMT

Unbaited

A browser extension that filters out engagement bait from your feed on Twixxer. Uses Llama 3.3 under the hood to analyse Tweets in real time and then blurs out sensationalist political content. Or whatever else you prompt it to blur – the system prompt is editable:

This is certainly a way to try and manage Twixxer's slow demise into right-wing extremist content. Though I'm taking this more as a thought experiment and interesting prototype than a sincere suggestion we should spend precious energy burning GPUs on clickbait filtering. Integrating LLMs into the browsing experience and using them to selectively curate content for you is the more interesting move here.

Smidgeons

Sat, 11 Jan 2025 17:02:34 GMT

Welcome to the smidgeon stream. This is a new kind of content on the Garden. One that was overdue. They're called smidgeons. Teeny, tiny entries. The kinds of things I used to put in Tweets, before Twitter died a terrible death.

Most are only a few sentences long. They're mainly links to notable things – good articles, papers, and ideas. I've been meaning to do this for a while, but a recent migration to Astro suddenly made it much easier.

How to Import Academic Papers from Zotero into Tana

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 09:58:54 GMT

How to use Zotero's translator and Tana Paste formatting to easily import papers into Tana

Growing a Human: The First 30 Weeks

Sat, 04 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Reflections on the strange experience of growing a human from scratch, without any conscious understanding of how you are doing it

December 2024

Sun, 01 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

We're back in that glorious post-Christmas, pre-New-Year's liminal period when the days blur together and I'm allowed to spend inordinate amounts of time tinkering on side projects and laying on the couch eating handfuls of Twiglets.

For the last couple weeks I've been plodding through an overdue and much needed migration of this website from Next.js to Astro. No shade on Next, but it wasn't the right framework for the job; I found myself constantly battling server-side rendering errors and trying to escape hatch out of React. Astro lets me return to writing plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, rather than being trapped in a single front-end framework. It also takes a lighter approach to JavaScript, only including it when needed, and is designed for content-heavy websites like this one. If you're reading this, the migration is complete! It took a good month but I'm much happier working in the new codebase.

The past six months have been a bit of a rush. At the end of July I got married, promptly learned we were pregnant, and started a new job two weeks later, right when debilitating “morning sickness” began to kick in. While the timing wasn't ideal, I'm obviously thrilled about all of it. Living life on warp speed over here.

Luckily the company I joined was very understanding! Normally is a small design and research agency focused on the practical and thoughtful application of AI. They're based here in London and I'm now a Lead Design Engineer there. This primarily means designing and building early-stage prototypes for our clients – either completely novel products or developing new services and features for existing systems.

Currently reading a sobering but beautifully written history of the Sackler family, Purdue Pharma, and the OxyContin opiod crisis called Empire of Pain. I'm usually not very good with horror, thrillers, or anything involving too much human peril and suffering. But Radden Keefe is a brilliant writer and his detailed historical narratives make it worth my discomfort.

<a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Empire_of_Pain/tN8OEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0">Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty</a> by Patrick Radden Keefe

A slightly horrifying tale of a family with no moral standards and egregious levels of megalomania.{" "}

Aesthetic Command Lines with Hyper, Spaceship, and Oh My Zsh

Sat, 05 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT

My fairly banal, basic, but beautiful command line setup

Leaving Elicit

Sun, 07 Jul 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Reflections on two years of working at Elicit and why it's time to leave

July 2024

Mon, 01 Jul 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Despite the regular drizzle, this summer is looking splendid. The tories are out of power. London is out in force enjoying the warm weather. I'm temporarily funemployed and thoroughly enjoying doing almost nothing.

I decided to leave Elicit back in April, and worked my last day there in June. The team was lovely, but living a life halfway between San Francisco and London was not. I realised I needed to work somewhere with more in-person collaboration, more senior designers, and on the same time zone as me. Fortuitously, I met some people who run an AI prototyping agency here in London and found our interests aligned. I'll be joining them at the end of July.

Until then I'm touching grass, prototyping new ideas for language model interfaces, writing things, shrinking my bedside book pile, improving this website a bit, and getting married somewhere in the middle. I now have a lot of thoughts on the trad femme world of weddings, but I'll save it for a proper post.

Currently working through John McPhee's Annals of the Former World, which is fat but satisfying. I'm not usually a rock-lover, but McPhee's storytelling and prose is beautiful enough to make plate tectonics, basins, granite, sediments, and conodonts seem compelling.

<a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Annals_of_the_Former_World/GS81F0RNxesC?hl=en&gbpv=0">Annals of the Former World</a> by John McPhee

A Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the geology of North America, across the fortieth parallel and down through 4.6 billion years. Tales of rock structures and the geologists trying to figure out what they're telling us.{" "}

Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

Thu, 30 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT

The emerging golden age of home-cooked software, barefoot developers, and why the local-first community should help build it

Faking William Morris, Generative Forgery, and the Erosion of Art History

Tue, 30 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Buying fake William Morris prints on Etsy and other early signs of epistemological collapse

On Opening Essays, Conference Talks, and Jam Jars

Sat, 13 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

How to open pieces of narrative non-fiction writing, conference talks, and sticky jars

Spinning Worlds, Seasickness, and Dealing with Vestibular Neuritis

Mon, 18 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Gaining a strange disease and losing my ability to see straight

A Collection of Design Engineers

Mon, 11 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Collecting people I know who work at the intersection of design and engineering, in an attempt to figure out what a design engineer is

Gathering Structures

Tue, 20 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT

How to gather people and create communities in ways that are low-stress and high-payoff

Speculative Calendar Events

Sun, 07 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Designing tentative calendar events to solve complex scheduling problems

Ambient Co-presence

Wed, 27 Dec 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Creating a subtle, peripheral, and synchronous sense of shared space and context on the web

Historical Trails

Mon, 18 Dec 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Giving people a visible, useful trail of where they've been over the course of an exploratory journey

December 2023

Fri, 01 Dec 2023 00:00:00 GMT

The limbo-like lull in-between Christmas and News Years is my favourite period of the year. I never know what to do with myself. I arrive back from chaotic, overstimulating family visits and sit amidst my pile of gifts, half-unpacked bags, and leftover chocolate, wondering what in the world I used to do with my days. I've long forgotten what it's like to have any semblance of life structure. Despite it only being a week since I was on a focused, tight schedule.

This weird floaty time is beautiful. I sit around writing long, trite reflections on the year. I look through my calendar week-by-week and count up arbitrary numbers of things.

1,140 kilometers run
89 coffee dates and park walks with friends
14 published pieces of writing (far less than I'd like)
6 podcast interviews
5 conference talks
5 Future of Coding events
5 driving lessons
1 driving test cancelled (I still haven't booked another)
2 weddings

I'm not sure these capture anything, but they give some shape to the past 12 months. For the most part, it was a stressful and sad year. I split up with my wonderful, long-term partner at the start of it. I want children, and he didn't. It's the one thing you can't compromise on. So I spent the following months being a pathetically heartbroken lump. I wallowed in work and distracted myself with travel and conferences and podcasts and excessively long park walks with friends.

But somehow, miraculously, just like the last 15 minutes of a cheaply made Netflix romcom, everything worked out in the final stretch. In our months apart my partner did a lot of reflection. He changed his mind and realised he does want a family. Knowing that you want to take on that level of stress, responsibility, and sleep deprivation isn't a small question, and one everyone comes to in their own time. I wasn't entirely sure I wanted children until my very late twenties. And it certainly would have been helpful to realise earlier...

Anyway, we got back together. And it's been pretty happily ever after since. We even put a ring on it to secure the ever after part 😉

{" "}

September 2023

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT

London flipped from sweltering summer back to drizzling grey yesterday. Autumn was overdue. Summer was a little too manic for my taste anyway. I spent a bunch of time in Maine, New York, and San Fransisco. A mix of long back porch hangouts with family, collaborator coffees, and in-person problem-solving with the Ought team.

But the Ought team are no longer the Ought team. We've changed names! And whole companies come to think of it. Ought as a legal entity was a non-profit research lab. But we found it difficult to get enough funding from the charitable space to hire people and grow Elicit, our primary product. Our founders decided to pull the same move as OpenAI and Anthropic and flipped to become a VC-backed startup. The new company is just called Elicit. We raised a seed round and rebuilt the product.

We're slowly moving our 200,000 active users over to the new beta version. We shipped it while we're still deeply embarrassed by it. It has a thousand big and small UX cuts that fill me with sadness. Every morning I get on and hack away at them, trusting at some point it will feel beautiful to use.

My work on Elicit and explorations of Language Model interfaces have compounded into some strong opinions. I gathered some of them into a new talk called Squish Meets Structure. I did one round of it for Smashing Meets AI, and then drastically improved it for Smashing Conference in Freiburg, Germany a few weeks ago.

I'm headed to Web Directions in Sydney, Australia and FFConf in Brighton later this year to present my slightly more macabre talk on the Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI. Expect to be all talked out after that.

Currently taking in writing advice from men named Ste(v/ph)en. Working through Steven Pinker's "The Sense of Style" and Stephen King's "On Writing" – both excellent. The former for grounded advice on non-fiction communication, the latter for an extraordinary account of persistently writing through double-shift minimum wage jobs and a raging alcohol and drug problem.

Spent the summer discovering how much I love dresses and jumpsuits with deep pockets. Found some of my favourites from Boden, Ro&Zo, Whistles, and Thought.

I've realised I spent the last decade avoiding femme clothing, aesthetics, and mannerisms in an attempt to be taken more seriously in the all-male spaces I hang out in. Spaces where I am routinely treated like a small, insignificant girl, ignored, and spoken over. Feels pretty freeing to give fewer shits and permanently live in dresses. They'll ignore me either way.

Squish Meets Structure

Tue, 20 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Designing with Language Models

Language Model Sketchbook, or Why I Hate Chatbots

Mon, 12 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Sketchy ideas for interfaces that play with the novel capabilities of language models

June 2023

Thu, 01 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

The last six months have felt like a disorientating blur. While bouncing between overseas trips, writing conference talks, organising events, and keeping up with work, I ended a long-term relationship and moved across London. My writing took a hit – I haven't published much this year. I feel like I'm still trying to figure out what to do when I get up every morning.

Having everything thrown out of whack is pretty useful. You figure out how resilient your systems are. You learn what you have committed to muscle memory and what you rely on cues from your environment to do.

I was also reminded how much I value my extended friend network in London (and the rest of Europe). My social groups here often feel like concentric overlapping circles – I can't neatly distinguish them. Which feels right; like a small village where everyone knows everyone. My philosophy friends show up at the Future of Coding meetups I run. My Twitter friends appear at dinners with my more woo creative people. It's difficult to beat the sheer density of curious, friendly, ambitious people in a big city like London. It is more than worth the price of rent IMHO.

It doesn't help that everything in the world of language models and generative AI has been moving at warp speed this year. I'm reading notes I took back in October of 2022 on GPT-3 and truthfulness, and it feels like we're in a completely different world now. The benchmarks are out of date. The prompting techniques are more sophisticated. The real-world use cases have proliferated.

I keep wanting to throw my hat into the discourse ring – I certainly have formed opinions at this point! But there's so much noise it's difficult to determine if you're adding any signal. I'm being cautious about it. Being a careful thinker feels like a rare quality at this point; I still aspire to it.

Some good reads as of late:

Bought myself used copies of Christopher Alexander's classics. Feels much better to hold these in your hands than scroll the PDFs.

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The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI

Thu, 27 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

An exploration of the problems and possible futures of flooding the web with generative AI content

Computational Notebooks

Tue, 18 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Shareable, browser-based documents that can compile and run code

Teenage Skeuomorphic Desktop Designs

Mon, 30 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

An archive of my high school desktop designs, circa 2009

Reverse Outlining with Language Models

Sun, 08 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Using language models to generate reverse outlines of writing drafts

The Dark Forest and Generative AI

Sat, 31 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Proving you're a human on a web flooded with generative AI content

Empty Pointers and Constellations of AI

Sat, 17 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT

On the fuzziness of calling things “artificial intelligence” and moving the goalposts

Command K Bars

Mon, 14 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Command line bars you can quickly summon with a keyboard shortcut

November 2022

Tue, 01 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT

It's a weird week. Twitter is (possibly) entering a slow death march and much of my community is reluctantly slouching over to Mastodon. I've started cross-posting there as well: indieweb.social/@maggie. The Elon-escapades only drive home how important it is to own and control the platform you're publishing to. Which means writing on your own website first and cross-posting to external platforms. The IndieWeb community has a catchy acronym for this: POSSE. Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.

I still don't have a Twitter-like stream setup on this site, but I'm working on it. Tools like WebMentions and Bridgy are going to do a lot of the heavy lifting. I'm having trouble finding many tutorials or guides on how to do it though – perhaps another case of writing the piece you want to read.

I've been working at Ought since late August. The London ↔ SF time difference is a bit crap, but I can't say enough good things about my fellow Oughters 🦦. It's rare and special to work alongside such thoughtful and ambitious people. We're in the middle of designing and prototyping some wildly different interfaces for Elicit, our AI research assistant and Ought's main product. Users say they love the current version, but we know it could be so much better.

In other news, I bought a cheap, used laser printer and it's drastically improved my reading experience for long articles and PDFs. Can't recommend it enough. There are plenty going for £30-40 on eBay and you'll finally read all those 5000-word blog posts you have bookmarked.

I've finally gotten back into a good writing cadence. I recently published Programming Portals and Command K Bars. Now I'm slowly chipping away at Tools for Thought as Cultural Practices, Not Computational Objects. I've been writing it forever, but that's kind of the point of gardening in public. You post up loose skeletons of ideas and flesh them out over time. Nothing forces you to write like knowing people are reading your half-baked version.

Programming Portals

Sun, 23 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Small, scoped areas within a graphical interface that allow users to read and write simple programmes

Folk Interfaces

Wed, 24 Aug 2022 00:00:00 GMT

People reappropriating existing software to solve their own unique problems

Joining Ought

Fri, 15 Jul 2022 00:00:00 GMT

A new role at an AI research lab working on tools for open-ended reasoning

July 2022

Fri, 01 Jul 2022 00:00:00 GMT

I've decided to join Ought, a non-profit research lab. I wrote about the move here, but TLDR: Ought is exploring how machine learning techniques can support open-ended reasoning and research. At the moment their main focus is building Elicit an AI research assistant that helps automate literature reviews. The long-term vision is to develop tools and techniques that mitigate AI alignment risks.

They're based in the Bay Area of California, so I'll be on flights over the Atlantic more often. London is still my home base for the long-term future. I'll spare you my gauche love letter to this city, but leaving only makes me realise how deeply I appreciate it. Stepping back onto TFL platforms, Sainsbury's aisles, and hodge-podge pavements feel like breathing again. Perhaps it's just a matter of contrasts though; San Fransisco's grimey vibes are not for me.

I've started hosting a monthly event for the Future of Code community here. I'm keeping it low-key for the moment. Meaning it's just thirty people in a pub talking shop about CRDT's, spatial canvases, and embodied cognition. My kind of Friday night.

We've got an exceptional class of people coming at the moment. I'm thinking hard about how to preserve this early group energy; keeping it small, not promoting it too much (lest the recruiters and VC's get wind of the event), and maintaining the “don't take this too seriously” vibes. Most other tech meetups in London turn out to be overstuffed, impersonal networking evenings. They're held in some fluorescently lit office where a handful of people give lightweight talks over lukewarm pizza. Everyone wants to escape home as soon as they've arrived. Avoiding this vibe is my first priority.

The Block-Paved Path to Structured Data

Wed, 25 May 2022 00:00:00 GMT

How block-based interfaces can help us create more structured data on the web

Daily Notes Pages

Wed, 04 May 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Daily notes as a frictionless default input for personal knowledge management systems

A Picture Worth a Thousand Programmes

Fri, 01 Apr 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Bringing visual explanations and embodied knowledge to programming tools

Programmable Notes

Fri, 18 Mar 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Agent-based note-taking systems that can prompt and facilitate custom workflows

Interoperable Personal Libraries and Ad Hoc Reading Groups

Sun, 20 Feb 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Exploring ways to build social infrastructure around books and reading on the open web

Spatial Web Browsing

Fri, 14 Jan 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Adding spatial affordances to the experience of browsing the web

Assumed Audiences

Sat, 08 Jan 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Naming your invisible audiences to free yourself from unspoken obligations

The Finest Narrative Non-Fiction Essays

Wed, 22 Dec 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Narrative essays that I consider ideal models of the medium

Epistemic Disclosure

Wed, 10 Nov 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Providing clear metadata on the epistemic validity of content

Metaphors We Web By

Sun, 24 Oct 2021 00:00:00 GMT

A history of our metaphorical understanding of the web

Algorithmic Transparency

Sat, 02 Oct 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Algorithms that make their reasoning visible

October 2021

Fri, 01 Oct 2021 00:00:00 GMT

After five years of working with egghead, I decided it was time to move on. I started as an illustrator in early 2016. By 2018 I had moved into an art director and leadership role. By 2020 I'd shifted to focusing on UX and product design.

I grew up in this company, but over the last year it's become clear I need/want to engage more in the rising "tools for thought" ecosystem. I've now joined HASH as the design lead. We're working on building a knowledge management platform (aka. "note-taking app") backed by schemas and structured data.

Plebeian Programming with Keyboard Maestro

Thu, 19 Aug 2021 00:00:00 GMT

How to write macros without touching the terminal

The Cultural Anthropology of React

Sun, 01 Aug 2021 00:00:00 GMT

An anthropological look at the cultural norms of the React community

August 2021

Sun, 01 Aug 2021 00:00:00 GMT

With lockdown easing in London I've spent most of summer outside throwing tennis balls around in the park, rather than sitting in front of screens writing words. It's been a good break, but I've missed researching. The British winter will descend again soon and I'll be back inside tending to the digital garden.

Dan Abramov and I finally launched Just JavaScript after 2 years of work. It's an interactive book that teaches JavaScript with a specific focus on mental models. I created the diagrams and animations that help communicate the core concepts. We created it with the support of the egghead team who took care of logistics like email promotion, web infrastructure, and customer support.

I've become enamoured with Visual Programming and End-user Programming over the last 6 months. The Future of Coding community and Gordon Brandon's newsletter have been particularly valuable hubs of insight.

Chatted with a few podcast folks;

Adam Wiggins and Mark McGranaghan on Metamuse about visual programming.
Scott Francis and Evan Payne on Frontend Heroes about a little bit of everything

Currently preparing a talk for two conferences in October; React Live Conference in Amsterdam and React Advanced here in London. On various ways to visualise React, why visual representations work so well, the pros / cons / wicked historical problems of adding graphical and spatial affordances to programming interfaces, and why we should keep trying despite the challenges.

Tools for Thought as Cultural Practices, not Computational Objects

Thu, 29 Jul 2021 00:00:00 GMT

On seeing tools for thought through a historical and anthropological lens

Paleolithic Nostalgia

Sun, 20 Jun 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Longing for the paleolithic past in the Anthropocene

Natureculture, Moral Purity, and Cultural Boundaries

Tue, 18 May 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Why there is nothing natural about the idea of 'nature'

The Linear Oppression of Note-taking Apps

Fri, 07 May 2021 00:00:00 GMT

What we lose when our digital notes remove the freedom to move

Digital Gardening for Non-Technical Folks

Mon, 26 Apr 2021 00:00:00 GMT

How to build a digital garden without touching code

The Echo & Narcissus Writing Club

Fri, 09 Apr 2021 00:00:00 GMT

A Hyperlink Academy writing club where we mimic the work of others

Pink, Soft, Glittering Developers

Sat, 13 Mar 2021 00:00:00 GMT

A collection of observations on the rise of soft, sparkly, baby pink aesthetics among developers

Fetishism & Mechanical Keyboards

Fri, 19 Feb 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Developer self-expression through coloured switches, keystroke actuation, and LED light displays

Making Programming Visual, Spatial, and Learnable

Tue, 12 Jan 2021 00:00:00 GMT

What's wrong with linear, static programming mediums and how might we improve them?

Transclusion and Transcopyright Dreams

Sat, 02 Jan 2021 00:00:00 GMT

The lost permissioning and copyright system of the Web

Organic, Local, Artisan Data Storage

Mon, 28 Dec 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Data is currently dislocated – our narratives and metaphors around it try to convince us it is immaterial

Positioning Elements & Scrollytelling in CSS

Sat, 26 Dec 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Notes on how to use the position property in CSS to make scrollytelling stories

Painting Roam Research with Custom CSS

Tue, 15 Dec 2020 00:00:00 GMT

How to customise Roam Research with your own CSS themes

A Digital Anthropology Reading List

Wed, 18 Nov 2020 00:00:00 GMT

A few favourite books from the field of digital anthropology

The Eponymous Laws of Programming

Mon, 16 Nov 2020 00:00:00 GMT

A collection of laws named for specific people in the field of programming

A History of Cyborgs

Sun, 01 Nov 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Notes on the history of cyborgs and why the idea still holds historical weight in Western narratives

Neologisms

Sun, 01 Nov 2020 00:00:00 GMT

A collection of interesting words that have recently been coined

A Brief Introduction to Digital Anthropology

Sat, 03 Oct 2020 00:00:00 GMT

A discipline at the intersection of cultural anthropology and binary logic

GreenSock Animations with React Hooks

Sun, 27 Sep 2020 00:00:00 GMT

How to use the Greensock animation library inside React using React hooks

Tools for Thought as Cultural Practices, not Computational Objects

Wed, 16 Sep 2020 00:00:00 GMT

On seeing tools for thought through a historical and anthropological lens

The Bare Essentials of Greensock

Tue, 08 Sep 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Notes on the basics of the Greensock animation llibrary

September 2020

Tue, 01 Sep 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Digging into the work of Barbara Tversky and reading the literature around embodied cognition. I've been a long time fan of George Lakoff so much of it us familiar. Tverksy's new book Mind in Motion builds off many of the same themes.

Delaying a part-time Masters degree in Digital Anthropology at UCL until next year when we'll hopefully be less Covid-y

Reading Working in Public by Nadia Eghbal

Exploring the connections between technology and magic through the writings of Alfred Gell. Specifically enjoyed the paper The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology

Playing Thing From the Future – A game that challenges players to collaboratively and competitively describe objects from a range of alternative futures.

Illustrating Gatsby's Key Concepts

Thu, 20 Aug 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Illustrated notes on the key concepts of how Gatsby.js works

Why You Own an iPad and Still Can't Draw

Tue, 18 Aug 2020 00:00:00 GMT

The failure of drawing materials without mediums and meat

Problematic Proteins

Sat, 08 Aug 2020 00:00:00 GMT

How to offend everyone with boundary-crossing steak and nuggets

New Harvest & Illustrating the Cultivated Meat Podcast

Tue, 04 Aug 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Illustrations made for a set of episodes of the Cultivated Meat podcast

The Gift Economy

Mon, 03 Aug 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Illustrated notes on the idea of Gift Economies and cultural historys of economic exchange

Synecdoche: Drawing the Part for the Whole

Tue, 28 Jul 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Notes on the metaphorical varieties of synecdoche and metonymy

A Meta-Tour of This Site

Wed, 22 Jul 2020 00:00:00 GMT

A video tour through how I build the old version of this site

Douglas, Dirt, and Matter Out of Place

Tue, 21 Jul 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Mary Douglas defined dirt as matter out of place – the crossing of boundaries

The Pattern Language of Project Xanadu

Fri, 10 Jul 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Project Xanadu as a pattern language, rather than a failed software project

Growing the Evergreens

Sun, 28 Jun 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Illustrated notes on the concept of 'Evergreen notes' and how to write them

The Knowledge Hydrant

Sun, 28 Jun 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Illustrated notes on the Knowledge Hydrant guide to collaborative learning

Frequently Asked Questions

Sat, 27 Jun 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Questions I am often asked to answer

A Naïve Exploration of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning

Fri, 26 Jun 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Notes on the academic field of CSCL and major papers in the discipline

Silent Synchronous Reading Sessions

Fri, 19 Jun 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Notes on how to run silent meetings and reading sessions

What the Fork is React Suspense?

Tue, 16 Jun 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Illustrated notes on how React suspense works

Visually Workshopping the AWS Cloud

Tue, 16 Jun 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Some insights into how I collaborative with experts to create illustrated notes on technical topics

Are Data Unions the Future of Data?

Mon, 15 Jun 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Illustrated notes on how data unions work and what problems they might solve

A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden

Wed, 10 Jun 2020 00:00:00 GMT

A newly revived philosophy for publishing personal knowledge on the web

Pattern Languages in Programming and Interface Design

Wed, 03 Jun 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Notes on pattern languages and Christopher Alexander's legacy on software programming

A Metaphorical Reading Collection

Mon, 01 Jun 2020 00:00:00 GMT

A collection of my favourite books on conceptual metaphor theory

Tending Evergreen Notes in Roam Research

Sun, 31 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

A walkthrough of how I manage and tend Evergreen notes in Roam

Fixing Common Git Mistakes

Thu, 21 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Illustrated notes on common mistakes people make in Git, and how to fix them

What App is That?

Wed, 20 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

A guide to the apps and tools I use to create illustrations

Tracking Humanity

Tue, 12 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

The introduction to my thesis on the Quantified Self movement and the culture of self-tracking

A Short History of Bi-Directional Links

Mon, 04 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Seventy years ago we dreamed up links that would allow us to create two-way, contextual conversations. Why don't we use them on the web?

The Dark Forest and the Cozy Web

Sat, 02 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

An illustrated diagram exposing the inner layers of the dark and cozy web

Drawing the Invisible: React Explained in Five Visual Metaphors

Fri, 01 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Explaining React through visual metaphors

A Chat with Henry Zhu on OSS & Gift Economies

Thu, 30 Apr 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Notes from my podcast episode Open Source and Gift Economies on Maintainers Anonymous

Building a Second Brain: The Illustrated Notes

Thu, 16 Apr 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Illustrated notes on the Building A Second Brain course

How to Become a Neo-Cartesian Cyborg

Sun, 01 Mar 2020 00:00:00 GMT

A lightening talk on second brains and cyborg embodiment

Defend Your Cookies with Essential Web Security Tactics

Sat, 08 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Illustrated notes on the essentials of web security

How to Draw Invisible Programming Concepts: Part I

Fri, 24 Jan 2020 00:00:00 GMT

A case study showing how I make illustrations for abstract programming concepts

What the Fork is xState?

Wed, 22 Jan 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Illustrated notes on how to build state machines with the xState library

A Journey into Vue-Router

Thu, 16 Jan 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Illustrated notes on how routing works in Vue.js

What the Fork is Rust?

Fri, 10 Jan 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Illustrated notes on the core concepts in Rust

The Art and Craft of Gatsby Themes

Wed, 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Illustrated notes on building Gatsby themes

JavaScript Bits You Skipped the First Time Around

Sat, 28 Dec 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Illustrated notes on advanced but fundamental topics in JavaScript

Meat Planet: The Illustrated Notes

Sat, 28 Dec 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Visualising the cultural narratives around cultured meat

Building Custom React Hooks

Sat, 02 Nov 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Illustrated notes on building custom React hooks

Immutable Data with Immer and Personal Assistant Bots

Sat, 10 Aug 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Illustrated notes on how work with immutable data in the Immer state library

Speaking the GraphQL Query Language

Tue, 30 Jul 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Illustrated notes on the basics of the GraphQL query language

The Best Illustration Books and Courses

Sat, 06 Jul 2019 00:00:00 GMT

My favourite resources for learning to draw and developing your visual thinking skills

A Fresh Serving of JavaScript ES2019

Sun, 23 Jun 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Illustrated notes on the new language changes in JavaScript ES2019

The JAMStack, Gatsby & Contentful

Sat, 01 Jun 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Illustrated notes on the JAMstack, Gatsby & Contentful

Instachatting with Vue & Socket.io

Mon, 20 May 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Illustrated notes on how to implement web sockets with Vue.js and Socket.io

Building VR Apps with React360

Tue, 14 May 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Illustrated notes on building VR web apps with React360

Testing Apps with Cypress

Fri, 10 May 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Illustrated notes on how to test web apps with Cypress

How Are Compilers & Transpilers Different?

Wed, 01 May 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Illustrated notes on how compilers and transpilers are different

Meet the Robowaiter APIs Serving Us Data

Wed, 10 Apr 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Everything you need to know about what API's are and how they work

A Shelfish Starter Guide to Databases

Sun, 10 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT

The absolute minimum you need to know about data storage

A Fruitful Guide to JavaScript's Comparison Operators

Thu, 14 Feb 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Illustrated notes on how JavaScript's comparison operators work

What the Fork is Babel?

Fri, 01 Feb 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Illustrated notes on how Babel works

JSX is a Lovechild

Sun, 20 Jan 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Illustrated notes on how JSX in React works

What the Fork is the React Virtual DOM

Sun, 20 Jan 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Illustrated notes on how the React virtual DOM works

JavaScript's ...spread Operator

Sun, 20 Jan 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Illustrated notes on how JavaScript's spread operator works