There is a sentence from my childhood that was never spoken. It was only ever shouted. "IT'S PIKACHU!" If you grew up when I did, you know exactly where that shout lived. Middle of the cartoon, right before the commercial break. The screen goes dark, a silhouette fades in, and a voice asks the only question that mattered in that living room: Who's that Pokémon? The rules of the living room Nobody ever explained the rules, but everyone knew them. You shouted your answer before the break end...

There is a note in my notes app called "china - for friends." It is a few years old now and I have sent it to maybe a dozen people. Every time someone tells me they are finally coming to visit, I open it, read it top to bottom, fix whatever has gone stale, and paste it into the chat. Then, a few weeks after they leave, I open it again and edit it based on what actually confused them. It might be the most useful thing I have ever written, and it is just plain text. Three lines The first versio...

There's a specific kind of dread that shows up when you're building something that runs entirely in a browser tab: the moment you imagine someone dropping in the biggest, ugliest file they own, just to see what happens. For me that file was a 200-page scanned report someone had sent me during early testing, thick with embedded charts and full-page tables. I remember opening it locally and thinking, with real unease, this is going to lock the tab up, isn't it. That fear is worth taking seriously...

I run a small fullscreen clock site. No accounts, no ads, and — this is the part that still feels slightly uncomfortable to admit — no analytics. Not a stripped-down analytics setup, not a self-hosted privacy-friendly one. None at all. I genuinely do not know how many people open it in a given week, which theme they pick most, or whether anyone has ever kept it running for more than five minutes. The decision was easier to make than to live with Leaving analytics out was the easy part. The too...