Painfully Obvious.

In part one of a too‐many‐parted series, learn how I turned a couple of sheets of MDF into an arcade cabinet with several pounds of sawdust as by‐product.

I don’t have the patience to learn new skills for their own sake. Most of what I know about computers, including everything I do at my day job, was something I learned because I needed it to do something cool. In 2001 I needed to learn PHP to make a…

Last time, I treated you guys to some Solomonesque baby‐splitting between Steve Klabnik and DHH, and then spent two dozen paragraphs talking about how Gowalla’s API was pretty groundbreaking and how Scott Raymond was like the Lou Reed of hypermedia APIs. To balance out all this ridiculous self‐praise, I’ll talk…

Before I convince myself it’s a bad idea, let’s take a retrospective look at the Gowalla API (which, by the way, was started in 2008–2009) and see how it measures up against a hypermedia rubric.

The recent mailer from the U.S. Census Bureau struck a chord with two of my hobbies: information design and open government. Today I’ll be redesigning a piece of paper that looks mundane but has an astonishing impact on the amount of money our country is spending to conduct the 2010 Census. Sometimes good design can solve large‐scale problems.

If you don’t know about Raphaël, you’d better ask somebody. It provides a vector drawing API that works in all major browsers (by abstracting between SVG and VML). I’ve been working on a JavaScript charting library called Krang. Krang is designed to take a data set and produce any chart…

Today I’m going to be talking about Object.extend without much introduction or context. Bear with me. This is a prerequisite blog post for something I’ll be talking about in a few days.

Here’s the short version: I made a site called Filibusted that just won Sunlight Labs’ “Apps for America” contest.

Jason Scott rips into Joe Clark. I have learned a number of things from Joe Clark, and I still find reason to link someone to i let u b u at least once per quarter. But I can’t find much fault with this assessment of his words and his worldview.…

Here’s a lovely pagination control I looked at on PSDTUTS today. Actually, first I used it; when it took me to a page I was not expecting, I hit the Back button and looked at it. It’s a testament to both my arrogance and my compulsiveness that I found five…