Is Your App a House of Cards, or Is It Stable? Both, Probably.

I made up a dumb little error code idea last year to help solve a problem every web app has. The problem is this. When a user encounters an error in a complicated part of your app—let’s say a part where three or four smaller parts could have failed—you don’t want to blast them in the face with a huge, technical error. ERROR: The fetch() call to...

When I first started making web apps—way back when they were called “websites”, which consisted of these ancient things called “web pages”, which were files made by people called “web masters” (yeesh)—there was more or less a standard way to serve them. You rented a little space at a hosting provider, and then either they, or you, would run...

Ijoined a new gym last week. I went to the LA Fit Expo the weekend before, and this new independent gym had set up a booth and given me a free day pass. So I tried them out in person, liked it, and joined. I was what marketing people might call a “textbook conversion”. The gym is so goddamn nice by the way, it’s bonkers. Anyway, they have you...

Almost everyone who makes web apps seems to hate web apps, I’ve noticed. And, more specifically, they hate the complexity that manages to find its way into doing anything, no matter how simple. A modern web app that just says “Hello world!” requires like five thousand times more computing power to render than the entire Apollo space program used...

The “app ecosystem”, as it exists today, is hopelessly broken. Around the start of the pandemic I started cooking more, and shortly thereafter decided I wanted a recipe app. This idea immediately made me cringe. Just thinking about having to search “best recipe apps” on Google, getting 200 identical clickbait-and-popups-website results, going to...