Question: I keep getting notification from your bluesky (usually of the “spicy(ish) take” variety, but then when I click them the post is gone. Do you keep posting and then deleting these things? Or is this some bluesky bug showing me things I don’t have access to?
Answer: Yeah, I delete things pretty often. Seeing a new post in context always makes me rethink it and I'm not precious about 'keeping things online' if I feel like they're not the right tone.
Question: Is there still an archive of placemark.io content somewhere? Specifically, I was looking for the blog, where I vaguely remember reading interesting stuff about tech choices. Basically, I was just trying to see if you had written anything about deck.gl, would also be interested if it's somewhere else!
Answer: Yep, there's an interactive site archive at https://old.placemark.io/ and a source archive of content at https://github.com/placemark/docs
I don't think I ever wrote about deck.gl, but basically I did eventually adopt it for rendering draggable points in Placemark, and it's one of the decisions I regret Deck's performance was all at the cost of stability, and it ended up as the culprit for a bunch of crashes and incompatibilities, plus it relies on internal Mapbox GL APIs so it was tough to update and test reliably.
I like that Deck exists, but I really prefer to have one renderer and have it do visualizations well rather than sneaking multiple engines into the same WebGL context.
Question: how do you decide what to post on bluesky and what to post on mastodon? (And, I guess, when to make a micro blog post?)
Answer: I treat Bluesky like Twitter, trying to make things snappy and semi-professional. Mastodon is where the nerds are so I post more personal projects and niche stuff there. Micro posts are for anything that requires more room to breathe or feels like it could be referred back to later.
Question: Any grand bagmaking aspirations?
Answer: I really want to make a good tote bag, like the Adsum Zip Tote or some of the stuff from 1733. Interior zippers and bound edges are next on the critical skills to learn.
Question: show me what you are
Answer: creepy question!
Question: How do you bookmark links? Which tool, workflow? Do you use tagging, hierarchy, or something in between?
Answer: I don't generically bookmark links - for things that I want to keep in topic-oriented collections, I put them in are.na, for links I want to revisit soon I'll put them in my todo list in Things, and for things I want to read I'll put them in Instapaper. Are.na is organized but the rest are pretty flat and unstructured.
Question: Is this the end of the Recently posts?
Answer: Nope, I was just on vacation and offline on August 1st - next month I'll do an extra big one.
Question: What is one interface design challenge you faced when building Placemark?
Answer: One big challenge was determining exactly how interconnected the different views of data should be. For example, with the table editor, if you selected a row then it would focus that feature on the map. But if you searched and filtered the table, should it also restrict what's shown on the map? And should that override other forms of visibility control like the ability to toggle features on and off in the tree view? That was definitely tricky: I think that a lot of the magic of the interface is that you can see data in three different ways simultaneously, but when the interface itself has state that affects data visibility, that complicates the mental model.
Question: On your 2024-07-10 microblog post you said "Firefox… I want to believe, but… I think it’s just dead, man." According to your "uses" page, you recently switched to Firefox. What triggered this? Was it Chrome kicking out Manifest V2?
Answer: I temporarily switched because a bug in Chrome's dev tools made it really hard to debug some stuff - I think this is the closest bug report: https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40254754
But, yeah, I've stuck with it and have found Vimium to be a smoother experience on Firefox, too. Disabling uBlock is a big betrayal of trust and if I eventually switch off of Firefox it probably won't be back to Chrome.
Question: On your /about page you state "I do not use LLMs or AI tools to write, research, or publish anything on this website." Are you using LLMs or AI for anything right now?
Answer: Right now: I occasionally use Windsurf to do code refactoring. It's very hit or miss. I haven't had luck with LLMs writing new code: they're very often wrong. I use ChatGPT occasionally as a fancy semantic search and click through to its citations: like searching for "novels set in some particular town" is hard to get through a search engine but is within ChatGPT's ability, though I obviously have to check to make sure the results aren't hallucinated.
Question: Do you use Linux or have you ever considered? If yes, which distro would you go for?
Answer: I used Linux in college and switched to macOS basically as soon as I started my full-time job. Back then I was running Ubuntu and my cool coworkers were running Arch.
I probably won't switch back to Linux. Mac has gotten worse in a number of ways, but every time I use something else I'm pretty shocked by the sheer lack of attention to detail. Like it'll be a sleek UI but the font rendering looks like trash, or just how many applications are using non-native widget rendering. Plus there just seems to be never-ending chores involved to make the pieces fit together and keep things running. I like building software a lot but I do not like administering computers at all, so the macOS experience of using something like Arq to do backups or using DevonThink to store my PDFs is so, so, so much better than trying to glue something together with CLI tools and lackluster side-project GUIs.
If I were to, I've liked what I've seen of Elementary OS, GNOME, and to some extent Arch.
Question: What search engine do you use? What's your opinion about kagi? (I feel like you once tweeted about it, but I don't remember the details)
Answer: I use Kagi as a daily driver, and mostly love it: the only place where it falls short and I have to switch to Google is when I'm searching for something very new. Their scattershot product development approach is a little concerning but otherwise I love the vibe of the products. They're really doing the path of minimal JavaScript, good accessibility, fast and focused UIs. Whenever I have to use Google, it's alarming how much junk they've added to everything.
Question: What do you enjoy most about blogging?
Answer: What comes to mind right now is the freedom. My writing has never been explicitly connected to making money or accomplishing some particular goal. I've really steered it away from that stuff. Recently "content" on the internet has gotten a lot more monetized and insincere, like everyone is fully aware of the algorithm at all times, and always has an angle: every technical essay ends with a soft pitch for some startup, every influencer's video is either an ad or a try-out for an ad. It's nice to have something with no incentives either way, and no content next to what I'm writing. It's not pure or perfect but it's such a place of solace.
Question: What keyboard to you use? I think I remember you posting about different models.
Answer: I want to love weird keyboards and typing on them has totally improved my typing by forcing me to use the right fingers for the right keys, but… I use a Keychron K3 at work and K7 at home, just because they perfectly mirror the MacBook keyboard layout and they're "easy". I do really want to switch to one of their models that's programmable with QMK so I can stop using Karabiner to remap caps-lock to escape. But otherwise, yeah… they work! I still have the Atreus sitting around for when I feel like I need a challenge.
Question: What do you do at val.town? What's your day-to-day like?
Answer: It's a pretty small team and when I started it was just three of us, so I've done a lot of everything. More recently though, I do a ton of reviewing PRs and helping out with questions, and also a lot of engineering work on big features that we're trying to ship. Then a bit (not enough recently) of community support and business backend kind of stuff.
Question: What is your favorite monospace font?
Answer: I use PragmataPro every day when I'm writing code and in the rest of my terminal - I think it looks really good and is super readable.
Question: Any sports you wished you played?
Answer: It's be cool to play tennis and basketball, because both are easy to access in the city. All the activities I like are sort of focused on moving forward in one direction (running and cycling) so the agility is lacking.
Question: Have you ever been to Japan?
Answer: I have! Visited Tokyo, Yamanochi, and Kawasaki in 2015. Would love to go back, especially because I'm in the middle of reading Craig Mod's Things Become Other Things, which is all about living in and walking through Japan.
Question: what is your favorite city
Answer: New York City! Which is thankfully the city I live in. Objectively there are better cities in the world (Amsterdam, Tokyo, etc), but having friends & speaking the language bridges the gap.
Question: How do you post to your microblog?
Answer: I actually have a post on my microblog about just this: https://macwright.com/2023/12/14/blog-about-blog
Question: What is your third favourite dinosaur?
Answer: I don't have a good ready-to-go dino ranking but I do like the gastonia because it's very pokemon-esque and being armored at the skeletal level is nice.
Question: What are the most memorable live shows you’ve seen?
Answer: Seeing Wilco play in 2006 was a big one - for me, that's the peak of the music of theirs that I really love. More recently, I saw John Carroll Kirby perform and that was great - Logan Hone, their flutist, has an incredible stage presence.
Question: What kind of biking do you like to do and what are you favorite bikes?
Answer: Right now I'm very into anything that's very long distance and as separated from car infrastructure as possible - which means trails like the Empire Trail in NY, the C&O outside of DC, the Old Croton Aqueduct trail, etc. Used to be really into mountain biking and maybe I'll return to it someday if I have the time and the access to the outdoors. Bikes-wise, I love a good steel gravel bike right now, and there are a ton of cool ones being manufactured.
Question: During your career in the tech industry, have you ever experienced burnout? If not, do you fear it happening?
Answer: I've experienced burnout very often. I've dealt with it, mostly successfully, by constantly varying the kinds of things that I work on and giving myself a little grace when things aren't feeling as vivid as I'd like to. I don't really fear it anymore, but I do fear a more long-term decline in my belief in the space or my optimism about tech in general.
Question: Do you think you'll ever be pulled back in the direction of geospatial?
Answer: I think if I ever do, it'll be because I think I can do something useful, rather than a narrow focus on moving the technology forward or doing big fancy innovation. I think a bunch of Mapbox folks have ended up doing some of both - I've really liked seeing Nick Ingalls for example work on CloudTAK, an emergency responder system for Colorado. Something like that could be really cool and rewarding to work on.
Question: Favorite musical artists? Favorite painters or visual artists?
Answer: Hard to pick long-term favorites, but the musicians I'm really enjoying right now are Slow Mass (rock band from Chicago) and Mammal Hands (avant-garde Jazz from the UK). I really like Precisionist painters like Charles Sheeler and my favorite piece of art that I own is a pen drawing by Everest Pipkin.
Question: Test question
Answer: Hello! This is tom!
Question: Name a feature of a programming language **that you use** but also think should be removed
Answer: In TypeScript, I use and like enums but they were totally a mistake - really all of the parts of TypeScript that are not erasable, I wish were never included in the language and instead were proposed as JavaScript core features. The constructor shorthand (like constructor(public foo: string)) is in the same bucket. It's just a little too magic to pretend that JavaScript has these features but in reality enums are integers and you can get into weird situations where you mix the two.
Question: if you could code one thing to change the world, what would it be?
Answer: That's a really hard question because I basically started my career high on the optimism of Lawrence Lessig and Aaron Swartz and civic tech, and it's been a gradual decline ever since. There are a lot of ingredients to anything that changes the world - power, community, culture, luck - and in most cases technology is the least crucial part. The activist who keeps pushing on some issue for a decade and builds bridges changes a lot more for the better than the programmer, as far as I've seen, and I'm, to my own disappointment, not very good at community work yet.
So, what would change the world the most, one thing, with code? I would say total decentralization that works. Most decentralization either isn't total or doesn't work. Actually creating protocols that worked as well as iCloud or decentralized storage that really worked as well as S3 - that would inch the world along a little, and I think it'd make things a little better.
Question: whats your favorite peanut butter
Answer: There's this new brand called NuttZo that has not just peanuts but all kinds of nuts, it's very exciting. I think you can only get it at Costco though.
Question: What even is webassembly?
Answer: It's a psyop from Figma to trick people into burning VC money.
Question: What's your favorite color?
Answer: Yellow!