The Personal Website of Jeremy Boles

I Built a Blog and Forgot to Write

It’s easy to lose sight of why we’re doing something when the thing we’re doing is complex.

The Proportional Web

Oskar Wickström applying Bringhurst to the web: rem proportions, justified text with actual hyphenation, one typeface doing all the work. I tried the vertical-rhythm half on my own site and backed it out; the per-element discipline cost more than it returned.

justif - publication-grade text justification for the web

This is a neat project that brings Knuth-Plass justification to the web.

Recreating the Canon Cat document interface

Alexander Obenauer on rebuilding the Canon Cat’s document interface. The bit I keep coming back to is from the Cat’s own How-To Guide:

When our designers created the Cat they threw out all the junk that makes computers clunky and held onto the personality and immediacy of a typewriter.

Emacs Writing Machine

It’s validating to see that other people are having this problem too, and working with old computers to help them write.

It's getting harder to focus every day

This one hits close to home.

Things I Stopped Self-Hosting (And Why Cloud or Managed Won)

I’ve been feeling the time burden lately with all of the services I’ve been hosting. I hate renting everything, but I’m also feeling an intense need to get some of my time back.

How to make a font

I wish I had all of this information laid out like this years ago when I was messing with typography.

Faulty Towers, vibe sickness, and the vibe bobsled

It’s a lot of fun, but you don’t have a lot of agency in it. You sit in a bobsled, you go down an icy track, and really, there is only one way to go.

Empathy and delight mean nothing when the software is disrespectful

the cost of producing text is now far lower than the cost of consuming it, even though length and detail still feels like a sign that more thinking and more work had been put into something

Building and Shipping Mac and iOS Apps Without Ever Opening Xcode

This is going to come in handy for me soon.

How I Learned to Read Again

It’s almost impossible for me now, as it has been for years, to just pick up a book and to fall into the kind of daydreaming state that coffee mugs and coasters are always proclaiming is the essential joy of reading.

The Vintage Beauty Of Soviet Control Rooms

I’ve always loved the aesthetic of this era of design.

Copy That Floppy!

I have a stack of floppy disks at home that I’ve always wanted to try and pull data off of.

A Speed Limit for Computers

It’s interesting to think of computing within limits as having societal benefits.

The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

I try to remember this woman and her PlayStation Portable every time I read about a new whiz-bang browser feature.

Nobody Gets Promoted for Simplicity

…pay attention to what you celebrate publicly. If every shout-out in your team channel is for the big, complex project, that’s what people will optimize for.

In the Future All Food Will Be Cooked in a Microwave

A poignant take on where the AI frenzy seems to be heading.

Netizen

Like picking up trash where you walk, even if the rest of the world is full of litter. You keep doing what you can to make things better.