Archives

I've been blogging about programming, usability, and design since 2006.

There's also a full archive of my Twitter account (2008–2025).

2026

• De-Googling – Jan 16

2025

• devlog: garbage collection is useful – Nov 14
• Reflections on writing a book – Mar 24
• Make it happen – Feb 11
• Five coding hats – Feb 3

2024

• One way to do applied research – Nov 7
• Memories of some fantastic internships – Jul 31
• Playing like a kid again – Jun 30
• Taking learning seriously – May 30
• Bytecode VMs in surprising places – Apr 30
• Two little interpreters – Mar 26
• Casual programming – Feb 12
• Thoughts on Scratch – Jan 22

2023

• Cold-blooded software – Dec 28

2022

• The influence of Self – Nov 1
• Core dumps, feedback loops, and a game of telephone – Apr 28
• Getting things done (in small increments) – Mar 21
• Handling user input with structured concurrency – Feb 15
• Three ways of handling user input – Jan 5

2021

• Ohm v16 – Oct 4
• Visualizing Packrat Parsing – Jan 10

2020

• Sketches from CDG – May 2

2017

• Reading – Spring 2017 – Apr 23
• Task-Transforming Representations – Mar 20

2016

• What is State? – Dec 9
• The interesting thing about React – Sep 1
• What I've been up to at CDG – May 5
• Things I Read and Enjoyed in 2015 – Jan 5

2014

• Sketch Alignment Guides – Dec 8

2012

• Design Principles for Metaprogramming – Dec 19
• Goodbye WordPress – Jan 29

2011

• Google I/O: Memory Management for Android Apps – May 16
• Smarter Notifications with Locale for Android – Mar 18
• Making Notifications Better – Mar 8
• So You Want to Install a Python Package – Jan 6

2010

• Browser Bits: My mini-blog on browser UX – Apr 21
• My CHI2010 Talk: A Study of Tabbed Browsing – Apr 20
• Presenting at CHI 2010 – Apr 9
• An In-Depth Look at the User Experience of iPhone Safari – Jan 29

2009

• Thesis Update and Multi-Touch BumpTop – Oct 1
• Aaand...we're back. – Jul 20
• How many tabs do people use? (Now with real data!) – Apr 13
• 301 Redirect for the search usability win! – Mar 20
• Hire me for programming or interaction work – Mar 11
• Are short methods actually worse? – Mar 9
• tlogger: Capture click-stream web browsing logs – Feb 13
• My Tab Study: Apropos Links – Feb 5
• My Talk at Mozilla – Jan 29
• Sketchbook: Using Ubiquity with a mouse – Jan 15

2008

• Could visualization help make better software? – Dec 18
• Sketchbook: Firefox session restore – Dec 5
• Links: Windows 7, visualizing complexity, Cruz – Oct 30
• Removing debris from your interface – Oct 21
• Google Chrome: Usability Impressions – Sep 2
• Blogging is the hardest "conversation" I've ever had – Aug 26
• Wrestling with Tabs – Aug 25
• Actually, this IS your father's text editor – Jul 9
• The future of tabbed browsing – Jun 25
• Things to check out – May 27
• One fine day at meshU – May 21
• Sugar leaves the One Laptop per Child nest – May 16
• This is my brain on Twitter – May 7
• If this is Object Calisthenics, I think I'll stay on the couch – May 6
• Firefox's awesomebar: a command-line for web apps – Apr 23
• What I've been up to: freehand drawing on the OLPC laptop – Apr 17
• On wiki markup languages – Apr 11
• The *real* reason you want a multiple monitor setup – Mar 28
• Spring Fever: Links for March 14, 2008 – Mar 14
• If you can't say anything nice... – Mar 11
• Design Transformations – Mar 3
• A Hierarchy of Needs for Code – Feb 28
• Scribd's iPaper and the fragile web – Feb 22
• Why desktop search will give way to personal information search – Feb 7
• Designed for the Canadian Winter – Jan 28
• Multiple-Monitor Productivity: Fact or Fiction? – Jan 25
• What interaction programming is, and why it matters – Jan 18
• Links for January 15th – Jan 15
• The innovative interface of the OLPC laptop – Jan 10
• 5 ways to radically change computers (for the better) – Jan 1

2007

• Links for December 4th – Dec 4
• Design *for* our brains, not *like* our brains – Nov 29
• More downloading difficulties – Nov 23
• Firefox 3 Beta 1: Usability impressions – Nov 20
• Usability problems downloading from web apps – Nov 7
• Firefox 3 Awesomeness – Nov 6
• Mozilla Prism and the future of application development – Oct 26
• There are no little boxes: Everything is deeply intertwingled – Oct 23
• Information Revolution – Oct 22
• Greatest Misses: Popular posts from the last year – Oct 15
• Happy birthday to me – Oct 12
• Software needs editors – Oct 10
• Ontario election: Safari users out of luck – Oct 10
• Two outta three ain't bad – Oct 9
• Jono DiCarlo's Top 3 Humane Open-source Applications – Oct 6
• Mundane usability problems – Oct 4
• White night, dark station – Oct 3
• Wacom's wacky new logo – Oct 2
• Graphics for summarizing customer reviews – Oct 1
• Uploading and downloading are seams in the web experience – Sep 28
• Usability mistakes with radio buttons – Sep 26
• Inspiration for HCI and usability practitioners – Sep 24
• Making up my mind about oversimplification – Sep 21
• As simple as possible, and then some – Sep 20
• Weirdness when minimizing Finder – Sep 13
• Revenge of the Nerds: Cool interfaces for electronic music – Sep 11
• Network issues – Sep 10
• Rethinking overlapping windows – Sep 7
• Erlang and the future of programming – Sep 1
• Oversimplification is confusing (or, Don't ask stupid questions) – Aug 30
• Avoiding the mailto: trap – Aug 29
• Data visualization roundup – Aug 23
• Yay for rectangular selection! (But just this once) – Aug 21
• Sometimes it's okay to be sucky – Aug 20
• Why is installing software on a Mac so complicated? – Aug 16
• Fun with clickwrap licenses – Aug 8
• On Quality Code: Less is More – Aug 3
• Do you use spatial organization? – Jul 31
• Python: Making easy things easy – Jul 31
• Icons by Picasso – Jul 7
• Sub-pixel font rendering: it ain't just about the looks – Jun 12
• Donald Norman on the design of intelligent machines – Jun 11
• Answers Are Easy, Questions Are Hard – Jun 6
• Why I'm Not Doing a Paper Prototype – Jun 5
• Multi-touch in the home – May 30
• Personal Information Beyond the Desktop – May 18
• Constipated Metaphors – May 15
• Google is not enough – May 10
• The dark side of tabbed browsing – Apr 6
• Riding the Rocket – Apr 4
• Doing Today's Job with Yesterday's Tools – Feb 27
• Warming up to OpenID – Feb 26
• What happens to our information when we die? – Feb 22
• Blake Ross takes on information management – Feb 20
• Users don't know what they want – Feb 13
• The past and future of the WIMP interfaces – Feb 12
• Yahoo! Pipes: Plumbing for the semantic web – Feb 8
• Back to the Future Part II – Feb 7
• Personal Information Management: A change is gonna come – Feb 7
• University of Calgary Interactions Lab – Jan 29
• Silos and Architecture Astronauts – Jan 22
• Enso: Back to the future – Jan 16
• iPhone is the acid test for convergence – Jan 10
• On static and dynamic typing, and corn tortillas – Jan 8
• 24 Hours in NYC, Part 2: MoMA Design Collection – Jan 5

2006

• 24 Hours in NYC, Part 1: ITP Winter Show 2006 – Dec 21
• Hitting the sweet spot – Dec 12
• Why can't my RSS play with your email? – Dec 8
• Why I Miss Static Typing – Dec 1
• The Unbearable Weight of Choice – Nov 24
• Useful Awkwardness – Oct 12