Applied Cartography × Val Town

(Order in the CSS rule sense, not the metaphysical sense.) The time has come to begin exfiltrating some higher-traffic, higher-leverage parts of Buttondown's admin UI away from the autogenerated Django admin and into some more bespoke components. Take, for instance, this rather grisly (but useful) inline admin table: This contains useful...

I invited nickd to join our Linear instance yesterday, which reminded me that I had a slew of notes I wanted to publish on our own experience of migrating from GitHub Issues to Linear, and some reflections on it as a product now that we've been using it for a few months. One useful lens for understanding a product's positioning and strategy is to...

Some kind words from Chris Krycho on Buttondown's Alternatives page: This is how I want all my tools to be. There is a ton of room in these markets for healthy and friendly competition — and no need at all for winner-take-all or monopolist attitudes. First off — credit where it's due, I originally came across this genre of page on Memberful's...

I've been on the hunt for a new way to dogfood Buttondown for the past month or so, and I've finally found it: Hypermodern Django. At this point, all of my/our usages of Buttondown for Buttondown don't involve archives: we're using it headlessly, with RSS-to-email and APIs powering both this site's newsletter and the 'official' one. This is...

Three months ago, I wrote Bluesky et al, in which I walked through the various platforms vying for the dubious title of "Twitter's successor" and landed on Bluesky as being my favorite, perhaps less out of its ostensible inherent virtues and more out of the size of its alternatives' flaws. Flash forward ninety days, and I feel as though I am a...