The Garden

What is AI's UI?

Hanselminutes

The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI

UX Brighton, Brighton +4

Talk about 2 years ago

Squish Meets Structure

Smashing Conference, Antwerp, Brussels +3

Talk almost 2 years ago

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

My fairly banal, basic, but beautiful command line setup

Note 8 months ago

Barefoot Developers, AI, and End-user programming

Localfirst.fm

Possible Futures for AI in Interaction Design

Complementary

Leaving Elicit

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

Note 11 months ago

Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

Local-first Conference, Berlin

Talk 12 months ago

Becoming an AI-native Designer

Dive Club

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

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

Visual Storytelling in Tech, Designing for Al, and the Future of Coding

Devtools FM

On Opening Essays, Conference Talks, and Jam Jars

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

The Finest Narrative Non-Fiction Essays

Narrative essays that I consider ideal models of the medium

Note over 3 years ago

Spinning Worlds, Seasickness, and Dealing with Vestibular Neuritis

Gaining a strange disease and losing my ability to see straight

A Collection of Design Engineers

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

AI Tool Design and Tending a Digital Garden

Sketchnote Army

Gathering Structures

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

Note over 1 year ago

Speculative Calendar Events

Designing tentative calendar events to solve complex scheduling problems

Note over 1 year ago

Ambient Co-presence

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

Pattern over 1 year ago

Historical Trails

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

Pattern over 1 year ago

Why You Own an iPad and Still Can't Draw

The failure of drawing materials without mediums and meat

Essay almost 5 years ago

Language Models, AI, and Digital Gardens

Shoptalk Show

On Digital Gardening

The Informed Life

Nope

BBC's Digital Human

Pattern about 2 years ago

Language Model Sketchbook, or Why I Hate Chatbots

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

Note almost 2 years ago

Computational Notebooks

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

Why We Write and Language Models

Clerestory

Neologisms

A collection of interesting words that have recently been coined

The Dark Forest and Generative AI

Clerestory

Teenage Skeuomorphic Desktop Designs

An archive of my high school desktop designs, circa 2009

Note over 2 years ago

Reverse Outlining with Language Models

Using language models to generate reverse outlines of writing drafts

Note over 2 years ago

The Dark Forest and Generative AI

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

Essay over 2 years ago

Empty Pointers and Constellations of AI

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

Note over 2 years ago

The Dark Forest and the Cozy Web

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

Tools for Thought as Cultural Practices, not Computational Objects

On seeing tools for thought through a historical and anthropological lens

Essay almost 4 years ago

Command K Bars

Command line bars you can quickly summon with a keyboard shortcut

Pattern over 2 years ago

A Digital Anthropology Reading List

A few favourite books from the field of digital anthropology

Pattern almost 3 years ago

Programming Portals

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

Pattern over 2 years ago

Folk Interfaces

People reappropriating existing software to solve their own unique problems

A Picture Worth a Thousand Programmes

React Advanced, London +2

Talk about 3 years ago

Joining Ought

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

Note almost 3 years ago

Positioning Elements & Scrollytelling in CSS

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

Pattern about 3 years ago

The Block-Paved Path to Structured Data

Structured Content Conference, San Fransisco

Talk about 3 years ago

Daily Notes Pages

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

Want to be Great at UX Research? Take a Cue from Cultural Anthropology

The Stack Overflow Podcast

Building a Second Brain: The Illustrated Notes

Illustrated notes on the Building A Second Brain course

On Digital Gardening

Reverb

Pattern about 3 years ago

Programmable Notes

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

Interoperable Personal Libraries and Ad Hoc Reading Groups

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

Note over 3 years ago

Metaphors We Web By

A history of our metaphorical understanding of the web

Essay over 3 years ago

Spatial Web Browsing

Adding spatial affordances to the experience of browsing the web

Assumed Audiences

Naming your invisible audiences to free yourself from unspoken obligations

The Eponymous Laws of Programming

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

Epistemic Disclosure

Providing clear metadata on the epistemic validity of content

Algorithmic Transparency

Algorithms that make their reasoning visible

Frequently Asked Questions

Questions I am often asked to answer

The Pattern Language of Project Xanadu

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

Essay almost 5 years ago

Pink, Soft, Glittering Developers

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

The Best Illustration Books and Courses

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

Pattern Languages in Programming and Interface Design

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

A Meta-Tour of This Site

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

Tracking Humanity

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

A Metaphorical Reading Collection

A collection of my favourite books on conceptual metaphor theory

Illustrating Gatsby's Key Concepts

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

A Brief Introduction to Digital Anthropology

A discipline at the intersection of cultural anthropology and binary logic

Essay over 4 years ago

New Harvest & Illustrating the Cultivated Meat Podcast

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

Making Programming Visual, Spatial, and Learnable

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

Plebeian Programming with Keyboard Maestro

How to write macros without touching the terminal

Note almost 4 years ago

Fortress of Solitude

Frontend Heroes

Visual Programming

Metamuse

The Cultural Anthropology of React

React Rally, Online

Talk almost 4 years ago

Paleolithic Nostalgia

Longing for the paleolithic past in the Anthropocene

Essay almost 4 years ago

Natureculture, Moral Purity, and Cultural Boundaries

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

Tending Evergreen Notes in Roam Research

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

Digital Gardening for Non-Technical Folks

How to build a digital garden without touching code

Essay about 4 years ago

The Echo & Narcissus Writing Club

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

A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden

A newly revived philosophy for publishing personal knowledge on the web

Essay almost 5 years ago

What App is That?

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

The Linear Oppression of Note-taking Apps

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

Douglas, Dirt, and Matter Out of Place

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

Digital Disembodiment

Hope in Source

Unique Roles of a Developer

She's in Tech

Problematic Proteins

How to offend everyone with boundary-crossing steak and nuggets

How to Draw Invisible Programming Concepts: Part I

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

Essay over 5 years ago

Fetishism & Mechanical Keyboards

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

Meat Planet: The Illustrated Notes

Visualising the cultural narratives around cultured meat

Essay over 5 years ago

Painting Roam Research with Custom CSS

How to customise Roam Research with your own CSS themes

Growing Digital Gardens and Tending the Web

The Swyx Mixtape

A Short History of Bi-Directional Links

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?

Essay about 5 years ago

Transclusion and Transcopyright Dreams

The lost permissioning and copyright system of the Web

Essay over 4 years ago

Are Data Unions the Future of Data?

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

Organic, Local, Artisan Data Storage

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

Essay over 4 years ago

A History of Cyborgs

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

Technology as Process

Hope in Source

Embodied Knowledge - Part 2

Hope in Source

GreenSock Animations with React Hooks

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

The Bare Essentials of Greensock

Notes on the basics of the Greensock animation llibrary

The Gift Economy

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

Synecdoche: Drawing the Part for the Whole

Notes on the metaphorical varieties of synecdoche and metonymy

Digital Anthropology, Digital Gardens and Illustrated Notes

RoamFM

Growing the Evergreens

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

The Knowledge Hydrant

Illustrated notes on the Knowledge Hydrant guide to collaborative learning

A Naïve Exploration of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning

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

Silent Synchronous Reading Sessions

Notes on how to run silent meetings and reading sessions

What the Fork is React Suspense?

Illustrated notes on how React suspense works

Visually Workshopping the AWS Cloud

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

Drawing the Invisible: React Explained in Five Visual Metaphors

Women of React, Online +1

Talk about 5 years ago

Fixing Common Git Mistakes

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

Embodied Knowledge - Part 1

Hope in Source

Open Source as a Gift Economy

Hope in Source

A Chat with Henry Zhu on OSS & Gift Economies

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

The Power of Mental Models

React Podcast

How to Become a Neo-Cartesian Cyborg

Building a Second Brain Meetup, London

Talk about 5 years ago

Defend Your Cookies with Essential Web Security Tactics

Illustrated notes on the essentials of web security

What the Fork is xState?

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

A Journey into Vue-Router

Illustrated notes on how routing works in Vue.js

What the Fork is Rust?

Illustrated notes on the core concepts in Rust

The Art and Craft of Gatsby Themes

Illustrated notes on building Gatsby themes

JavaScript Bits You Skipped the First Time Around

Illustrated notes on advanced but fundamental topics in JavaScript

Building Custom React Hooks

Illustrated notes on building custom React hooks

Immutable Data with Immer and Personal Assistant Bots

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

Speaking the GraphQL Query Language

Illustrated notes on the basics of the GraphQL query language

Meet the Robowaiter APIs Serving Us Data

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

Essay about 6 years ago

A Fresh Serving of JavaScript ES2019

Illustrated notes on the new language changes in JavaScript ES2019

The JAMStack, Gatsby & Contentful

Illustrated notes on the JAMstack, Gatsby & Contentful

Instachatting with Vue & Socket.io

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

Building VR Apps with React360

Illustrated notes on building VR web apps with React360

A Shelfish Starter Guide to Databases

The absolute minimum you need to know about data storage

Essay about 6 years ago

Testing Apps with Cypress

Illustrated notes on how to test web apps with Cypress

Turning Technical Concepts into Approachable Illustrated Metaphors

egghead.io Podcast

How Are Compilers & Transpilers Different?

Illustrated notes on how compilers and transpilers are different

A Fruitful Guide to JavaScript's Comparison Operators

Illustrated notes on how JavaScript's comparison operators work

What the Fork is Babel?

Illustrated notes on how Babel works

JSX is a Lovechild

Illustrated notes on how JSX in React works

What the Fork is the React Virtual DOM

Illustrated notes on how the React virtual DOM works

JavaScript's ...spread Operator

Illustrated notes on how JavaScript's spread operator works