Maggie Appleton
https://maggieappleton.com/notes (RSS)
My fairly banal, basic, but beautiful command line setup
Reflections on two years of working at Elicit and why it's time to leave
The emerging golden age of home-cooked software, barefoot developers, and why the local-first community should help build it
An exploration of the problems and possible futures of flooding the web with generative AI content
Buying fake William Morris prints on Etsy and other early signs of epistemological collapse
How to open pieces of narrative non-fiction writing, conference talks, and sticky jars
Narrative essays that I consider ideal models of the medium
Gaining a strange disease and losing my ability to see straight
Collecting people I know who work at the intersection of design and engineering, in an attempt to figure out what a design engineer is
How to gather people and create communities in ways that are low-stress and high-payoff
Designing tentative calendar events to solve complex scheduling problems
Creating a subtle, peripheral, and synchronous sense of shared space and context on the web
Giving people a visible, useful trail of where they've been over the course of an exploratory journey
The failure of drawing materials without mediums and meat
Video, slides, and transcript from my talk on the challenges of designing with language models
Sketchy ideas for interfaces that play with the novel capabilities of language models
Shareable, browser-based documents that can compile and run code
A collection of interesting words that have recently been coined
An archive of my high school desktop designs, circa 2009
Using language models to generate reverse outlines of writing drafts
Proving you're a human on a web flooded with generative AI content
On the fuzziness of calling things “artificial intelligence” and moving the goalposts
An illustrated diagram exposing the inner layers of the dark and cozy web
Command line bars you can quickly summon with a keyboard shortcut
On seeing tools for thought through a historical and anthropological lens
A few favourite books from the field of digital anthropology
Small, scoped areas within a graphical interface that allow users to read and write simple programmes
People reappropriating existing software to solve their own unique problems
A new role at an AI research lab working on tools for open-ended reasoning
Notes on how to use the position property in CSS to make scrollytelling stories
How block-based interfaces can help us create more structured data on the web
Daily notes as a frictionless default input for personal knowledge management systems
Illustrated notes on the Building A Second Brain course
Agent-based note-taking systems that can prompt and facilitate custom workflows
Exploring ways to build social infrastructure around books and reading on the open web
Adding spatial affordances to the experience of browsing the web
Naming your invisible audiences to free yourself from unspoken obligations
A collection of laws named for specific people in the field of programming
Providing clear metadata on the epistemic validity of content
Project Xanadu as a pattern language, rather than a failed software project
The written version of my talk about bringing visual explanations and embodied knowledge to programming tools
A collection of observations on the rise of soft, sparkly, baby pink aesthetics among developers
My favourite resources for learning to draw and developing your visual thinking skills
Notes on pattern languages and Christopher Alexander's legacy on software programming
An anthropological look at the cultural norms of the React community
A video tour through how I build the old version of this site
The introduction to my thesis on the Quantified Self movement and the culture of self-tracking
A collection of my favourite books on conceptual metaphor theory
Illustrated notes on the key concepts of how Gatsby.js works
Illustrations made for a set of episodes of the Cultivated Meat podcast
A discipline at the intersection of cultural anthropology and binary logic
What's wrong with linear, static programming mediums and how might we improve them?
How to write macros without touching the terminal
Why there is nothing natural about the idea of 'nature'
A walkthrough of how I manage and tend Evergreen notes in Roam
How to build a digital garden without touching code
A Hyperlink Academy writing club where we mimic the work of others
A newly revived philosophy for publishing personal knowledge on the web
A guide to the apps and tools I use to create illustrations
What we lose when our digital notes remove the freedom to move
Mary Douglas defined dirt as matter out of place – the crossing of boundaries
How to offend everyone with boundary-crossing steak and nuggets
A case study showing how I make illustrations for abstract programming concepts
Developer self-expression through coloured switches, keystroke actuation, and LED light displays
Visualising the cultural narratives around cultured meat
How to customise Roam Research with your own CSS themes
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?
The lost permissioning and copyright system of the Web
Illustrated notes on how data unions work and what problems they might solve
Data is currently dislocated – our narratives and metaphors around it try to convince us it is immaterial
Notes on the history of cyborgs and why the idea still holds historical weight in Western narratives
How to use the Greensock animation library inside React using React hooks
The written version of my talk on explaining React through visual metaphors
Notes on the basics of the Greensock animation llibrary
Illustrated notes on the idea of Gift Economies and cultural historys of economic exchange
Notes on the metaphorical varieties of synecdoche and metonymy
A lightening talk I gave on second brains and cyborg embodiment
Illustrated notes on the Knowledge Hydrant guide to collaborative learning
Illustrated notes on the concept of 'Evergreen notes' and how to write them
Notes on the academic field of CSCL and major papers in the discipline
Notes on how to run silent meetings and reading sessions
Some insights into how I collaborative with experts to create illustrated notes on technical topics
Illustrated notes on how React suspense works
Illustrated notes on common mistakes people make in Git, and how to fix them
Notes from my podcast episode Open Source and Gift Economies on Maintainers Anonymous
Illustrated notes on the essentials of web security
Illustrated notes on how to build state machines with the xState library
Illustrated notes on building Gatsby themes
Illustrated notes on advanced but fundamental topics in JavaScript
Illustrated notes on building custom React hooks
Illustrated notes on how work with immutable data in the Immer state library
Illustrated notes on the basics of the GraphQL query language
Everything you need to know about what API's are and how they work
Illustrated notes on the new language changes in JavaScript ES2019
Illustrated notes on the JAMstack, Gatsby & Contentful
Illustrated notes on how to implement web sockets with Vue.js and Socket.io
Illustrated notes on building VR web apps with React360
Illustrated notes on how to test web apps with Cypress
The absolute minimum you need to know about data storage
A shirt design to celebrate React hitting 50,000 Github stars
Illustrated notes on how compilers and transpilers are different
Illustrated notes on how JavaScript's comparison operators work
Illustrated notes on how JavaScript's spread operator works
Illustrated notes on how the React virtual DOM works