Making and Tool-Making

Tool Making Follow-Up: What I Mean by Friction

Hopefully clearing up some of my vagueness to reduce misunderstanding.

We should be more tired than the model

Adding deliberate friction back into development

Building what customers need, not just what they ask for - Linear

Notes from our product team on building the tools we use every day.

FRICTIONAL AI WORKSHOP

Topics of the Workshop In its third edition, this workshop builds on and expands its exploration of friction-in-design in AI systems, hosting a full-day event that challenges the pursuit of seamless, rapid interactions. In contrast to the conventional narrative that human over-reliance on AI stems

“The Problem Factory”- Preemptive risk aversion in infrastructure planning and the role of professional services - Niskanen Center

In a small site of special scientific interest about 20 miles northwest of Oxford, a “shed” is being built.

A Practical Model for Jobs To Be Done (JTBD)

“People don’t want a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole” – Theodore Levitt The concept of jobs to be done provides a lens through which to understand value creation. The approach loo…

Build tools around workflows, not workflows around tools | thesephist.com

This March, I spent a couple of days traveling through western Iceland.

React, Electron, and LLMs have a common purpose: the labour arbitrage theory of dev tool popularity

Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland

Close to the Metal — Real Life

The value of reintroducing friction into our interactions with computers

Open by Design: ROOST's Approach to Safety Tool Development

Bjarnason: the labour arbitrage theory of dev tool popularity

Baldur Bjarnason argues that development tools win by making developers replaceable. The JVM ran that experiment three times, against Visual Basic's precedent, through EJB's committee, and into Spring's reversal, and the results say his theory is exactly half of a whole.

The Friction I Don't Want to Lose

I love learning. And while the friction of solving new problems is increasingly traded for speed, the experience gained by overcoming that friction is as important as ever.

Making tools for game developers — Codecks

Rather than use a tool that assumes order and fails when faced with the reality of game development, we're building a tool that assumes chaos and, in spite of that, reduces the stress that comes with it.

21 Productivity Hacks I’ve Picked Up Over the Years

A thorough list of practical productivity methods I've used and refined over the last 16 years.