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The original promise of personal computing was a new kind of clay. Instead, we got appliances: built far away, sealed, unchangeable. In this essay, we envision malleable software: tools that users can reshape with minimal friction to suit their unique needs.

This handbook represents the best of our collective knowledge on management and serves as the foundation of our internal training program here at Clearbit.

I might write stuff here sometimes. Contribute to madprops/blog development by creating an account on GitHub.

An essay about bad AI app design

In response to my article yesterday about how open source is kind of broken, one of my readers introduced me to the idea of fair-code. Fair-code is not a software license. It describes a software model where software: is generally free to use and can be distributed by anybody has its source code openly available can be extended by anybody in public and private communities is commercially restricted by its authors Fair-Code is more-or-less open source, except the author of the code has sole control over commercialization.

Learn how serverless is a scam and why you should just use a container.

What makes a good group project? What should students learn? How should they be graded?

Fine-tuning LLMs can save tokens, guarantee output formats, & bake in edge-case fixes. Learn when to fine-tune & how to do it effectively for your AI projects.

Today, I would like to talk about a common challenge that many designers face — creating and updating design portfolio. Portfolio is essential thing that presents your work to potential employers…

A reflection on control, burnout, and the strange weight of technical fluency.

AI's real threat to education.

Les réflexions nécropolitiques du Père Duchesne

Learn about rate limiting algorithms with interactive apps, including Token Bucket, Leaky Bucket, Fixed Window, and Sliding Window methods

Know where AI is a crutch and where it’s an abstraction.

Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.

AI is distracting us from creating real value. While we chase speed and automation, meaningful and human-centered work is getting left behind. Is this progress?

AI, ChatGPT, and LLMs "have absolutely blown up what I try to accomplish with my teaching."

In this blog post, we explore how we can style text that we log to the console in Node.js. Some of the examples use a Unix shell but most of the code should also work on Windows.