This Modern Web

  • I love personal computing!

  • We have lift off 🚀: The 2024 refresh of This Modern Web is now live on the new domain p.atrick.org.

  • Dusting off the cobwebs on this old thing...

  • Meeting People Is Easy

  • Deeply feeling this... Desperation-Induced Focus by Ravi Gupta

    Processes that feel unnecessary really demotivate and kill creative spirit. One of the main reasons why I went from big tech to startup earlier this year.

  • I’ve been spending more time than I should wondering why someone would choose not to add an RSS feed to their personal blog/website in favor of a “subscribe to updates with email”

  • First week at WorkOS is in the books. Really excited to share some of the stuff that we’ve been working on 🚀

  • After 6.5 years, today is my last day at GitHub. It is truly the best job that I've ever had thanks to the people that I got to work with here. I'm proud to have been a small part of GitHub's impact on the world and forever grateful for opportunities that came with it. 💜

  • Boosted this morning 💉

  • Some incremental improvements to the personal website…

    • Re-wrote it in Next.js
    • Switched to Stitches for styling

    Loving the perf gains so far.

  • It’s the Saturday after Thanksgiving… time to get a tree.

  • It’s a: gotta dig up my septic tank with a shovel to find out that it’s not draining properly kind of day.

  • What’s your least favorite website that you have to use? Mine is the Microsoft Corporate training SharePoint portal.

  • Sensing some cosmic shifts these last weeks. 🪐👽

  • Got Moderna shot #2 yesterday. The day after symptoms are no joke. I’ve been laid up with a fever and body aches all day.

  • Ideas for future posts:

    • Designing principles
    • Fewer concepts and more types
    • Finding that sweet spot between implementation and concept/shaping
    • Looser process/stricter framework

  • Man you gotta love Benioff (I mean, you don’t but he’s going to try), he clearly worked for Larry Ellison, loved Larry Ellison, and then said, I will be the absolute opposite of Larry Ellison and yet still build the most phallic building in history.

    Let’s Skim! The Slack/Salesforce Press Release

  • I think I might be ready to start writing again...

  • One of my favorite websites now has an iOS app... Check out what the poolside.fm folks have been building over at https://cellular.poolside.fm

    The closest thing you can get to drinking Peach Bellinis at your desk. ★★★★★

  • Yesterday marked my five year anniversary of working at GitHub 🎉

  • It feels obvious now, but just starting to realize that my own creative output correlated to my personal happiness and probably my mental health, also.

  • I love me some internet nostalgia and 98.css does not disappoint.

    98.css is a CSS library for building interfaces that look like Windows 98.

    A pretty damn faithful recreation of the UI that sent me online curiously building my first web pages, Winamp skins, Visual Basic programs, and pirated copies of PhotoShop.

  • If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

    Maybe it was chronicles of their life as they got a job teaching in Japan and how it was leaving American for the first time and all the new things there and skateboarding and meeting people and trying to meet girls, or a photographer working for a while in Minorca or some island off Spain when music hit a rock scene period and all the young people were dressing up in leather and tight jeans and going out dancing to dance rock and writing about his thoughts on where he fit into the scene as he was kind of older but not old, or a compilation of weird and unexplained science and gnostic wisdom, or the things some guy was making out of wood or electronics in his garage, or some Japanese girl who posted pictures of herself looking extremely pink and pneumatic and writing little things with them.

  • Most Thursday nights, I was with three other humans in a too hot (or too cold) room constructed out of hastily framed walls, unfinished drywall, and 200 year old brick. Ah band practice, how I miss you. These days you'll find me at "band practice" in my home office smashing buttons on my Ableton Push, trying to get the most out of samples, VST instruments, and a lot of trial and error. A different kind of fun.

  • Gruber’s review of the 2020 iPhone SE showcases the bonkers performance of the A13 Bionic chip:

    ...a $400 iPhone SE bests a $3,000 top-of-the-line MacBook Pro in single-core CPU performance.

  • I am very excited to hear that NetNewsWire (my RSS reader of choice) is going to get iCloud syncing support! That was literally the only wishlist feature that I had for this app. Maurice Parker, a developer on the project wrote a nice piece about building the feature and his impressions of CloudKit in general.

    ht @manton

  • Some thoughts I had this week:

    • I’ve never been this conscious about what I'm eating every day because we only have a finite supply of staples like eggs, butter, milk, bread, etc…
    • I've never been this conscious of how I manage my time every day because my wife and I are splitting childcare duties and we need to balance getting work done and not sitting my daughter in front of a screen all day
    • I've never been this conscious of how often I work out because we all need to get some physical exercise to stay mentally and physically well

    Wellness in the time of global un-wellness, I guess.

  • Phases of social distancing / shelter at home: Week 1: WTF is this, the world is going to hell Week 2: Struggling to find balance between work and family Week 3: Every day is the same: depression Week 4: I’m lucky to have a job and be able to spend unlimited time with my family

  • I’ve been thinking a lot about how we can bring the principles and tools used in open source software development to the scientific and medical community to aid in finding solutions for big problems faster.

  • In a truly psychedelic moment during my morning run, I saw two older men (70+ years old) walking six feet apart, movements perfectly in sync, both wearing leather driving gloves, and both smoking giant cigars.

  • My daughter now has FaceTime dates set up with her classmates in pre-school because she can’t be physically close to them and probably won’t be for a few months. This makes me wonder if this time will have any long term affects on our kids?

  • Got inspired by Rafa’s Shortcut and whipped my own Apple Shortcut up to automate posting media and books to my Inbox from my iPhone. All I need is to select cover art from my Photos and the shortcut handles everything else (except the merge into master).

  • 🎥 Uncut Gems might be the most stressful and anxiety provoking film I’ve ever seen. Amazing on so many levels and the celebrity cameos were done in a way that I’ve never really seen before — at this scale, anyway.

  • Popular Science’s DIY hand sanitizer recipe:

    1 cup of 99% isopropyl alcohol, 1 tablespoon of 3% hydrogen peroxide, 1 teaspoon of 98% glycerin, ¼ cup, 1 tablespoon, and 1 teaspoon (or 85 milliliters) of sterile distilled or boiled cold water

  • I hope we see more of this from the tech industry, which actually has the resources to put a dent in the detection effort despite our government’s ineptness:

    The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced today that it will commit an additional $5 million to help public health agencies in the greater Seattle region enhance their capacity to detect novel coronavirus (COVID-19) in King County, Snohomish County and other surrounding communities.

    via gatesfoundation.org

  • First time I’ve seen a pixel font in the wild in about a decade. I’m not mad at it either.

  • Kinda love the “build the plane as you fly it” approach to making my personal site. The more things coalesce, the higher it flies.

  • I’ve been sick for three weeks, the longest I can remember. Makes me wonder if my body is getting weaker or are the germs are getting stronger.

  • 4 years at GitHub!

  • Are there any examples of design education that focus on how to effectively utilize existing infrastructures vs. blow everything up and start over?

  • 🤔 Does the long arc of the web bend toward non-bullshit? Link: The Bullshit Web

  • “I love the smell of incremental correctness in the morning.” - Anonymous

  • Zen and the art of website maintenance

  • Wrote code for the first time in a while today. Feels like stretching.

  • 👋🏻 I’m posting from the Micro.blog iOS app using the micropub API.

  • Hello, micro.blog!