Everyone Transitions People make a big deal out of transitioning your gender. Some people will call you brave, and others will threaten you with violence. Your friends and family might throw you a party, while your romantic partner might experience full on grief, and sit shiva for the person you used to be. It’s like a whole thing, but it doesn’t...
What is the point of the Liberal party? Here is my problem: why does Justin Trudeau even want to govern anymore? As I write this, Trudeau is on the verge of stepping down, the dam has broken, his time is up, so fine – but I was thinking about this question six months ago. You can repeat this question for Bonnie Crombie, here in Ontario. (What...
UIs Should Be Versioned, Just Like We Version APIs Every organization that offers an application programming interface almost immediately starts to version it. APIs are essentially contracts between us, service providers, and our users. The bargain is you build your app using our service in some presumably mutually beneficial arrangement, and in...
they’re going to build camps the day after The 2024 Election, i happened to be in berlin. the night before i’d assiduously avoided the news and yet somehow i didn’t fall asleep until late into the morning. it was as if i was channeling the world’s cumulative anxiety. i came to, feeling exhausted, and checked the news, and felt worse. it was an...
TCAF 2024 and “The Chromatic Fantasy” Due to childcare commitments, I had a tight window. As soon as my youngest snoozed, I hopped on the subway and found myself at the Toronto Reference Library for the 2024 edition of the Toronto Comic Arts Festival. I had exactly 45 minutes, which was obviously not enough time.1 I made peace with this fact,2...
You’re not Facebook. Why use their tools? I’ve seen folks expend remarkable amounts of effort to adopt Facebook tooling, for example GraphQL and React. Typically, the reasoning is that they’re Industry Best Practice™ for Solving These Particular Problems. I don’t have well-formed or particularly nuanced views on the One True And Right Way To Make...
hyperobjects i recently had to grapple with how my work’s APIs handled authorization. our team wanted to do something slightly weird, and given my talents and knowledge of where the bodies are buried it fell to me to figure out how to do it safely & securely, etc. now, the beating heart of GitHub is a sprawling, sixteen-year-old ruby on rails app...
I’m adding a garden section to this website,1 in the hope that I am able to make something interesting bloom. I’ve been enjoying Lu’s wikiblogarden, and been feeling inspired by the idea of keeping a slippy mindset. For a long time I have been consumed with hot takes and ideas that are too long to fit in a social media post, but not fleshed out...
The Conversion of Saint Paul by Palma il Giovane, 1595. We suffer from many hard collective action problems whose solution requires coordination across local, regional, national and international actors. For example, there is no individual person I can yell at to fix: climate change income & wealth inequality daylight savings time to say nothing...
Comparing new dwelling building permits per capita per year between select U.S. states and select Canadian provinces Canada is downstream of American culture, and Canadian housing discourse is no different. In the great, fiery, online fights about housing, Californians in particular are over-represented and tend to drive the terms of the debate....
The moment had arrived, the needle was ready. We’d come late to our appointment, and so for a half hour we cooled our heels in an empty examination room. We carefully inspected every article of furniture, peeked inside drawers, and batted at the battered posters hanging from the walls. All the while muffled sobs wafted in from the room adjacent...
Before the pandemic, fully remote work was rare. Now, many large tech companies are embracing remote work — and in tandem announcing that compensation will be scaled by geographic location. This can be a bit awkward. Typically, workers in the SF Bay or NY metro region are able to command large wage premiums but now everyone works from home....