Favorite digital things

In the spirit of digital minimalism, I’ve cleaned out my bookmarks and compiled them into this big list. This list only includes digital things; no physical stuff, no media. The purpose of this list is three-fold:

1. Make cool things discoverable for others
2. Serve as a personal bookmark page for things I like
3. Force me to be intentional about the things I use and read

This list is constantly updated. When I find a cool new thing, I’ll add it. When I lose interest in something, I’ll remove it. The history of this page is tracked via git.

As usual, ♥ indicates an absolute favorite.

Blogs

These are the blogs I read regularly. They’ve influenced my thinking and formed who I am today. I try to check each one around once per month.

Art

• Joel Simon - Beautiful generative art mixed with code
• Larsen Husby - Love me some maps
• Lingdong Huang - Procedurally generated fish, landscape paintings, and flowers
• Matt Keeter - Weird shaders, raytracers, and games
• Paul Stamatiou - Photography + hands down the best travelogues I’ve ever seen

General

• Ana Rodrigues - Bookmarks, bookmarks everywhere
• Evening Sends - Rock climbing writing, essays, and opinions
• Francesco Di Lorenzo - Bite-sized posts on life and programming
• Jamie Saxon - Measuring civic resources and their use. Former mentor
• Jeremy Maluf - ♥ Lists for onebag packing and other stuff. Inspired this post
• Kyle E. Mitchell - Interesting posts and takes on law ∪ technology
• Paul Graham - Classic essays on tech, life, and startups
• Steve Vance - Urban planning, travelogues, and Chicago thoughts
• Terence Eden - Life advice, book reviews, and technology. Running for decades
• Terry Tao - Time and career advice from the world’s best mathematician
• Tom MacWright - ♥ Spatial data, development, miscellany. Inspired this blog

Coding and tech

• Bradley Taunt - ♥ Small websites and minimal UX
• Cassidy Williams - Huge inspiration, amazing dev/streamer. Excellent newsletter
• Dan Luu - ♥ Classic engineering blog. Mostly on measuring interesting things
• Dan McKinley - Tech talker and creator of many influential slide decks
• Fabrice Bellard - Open-source hero and creator of ffmpeg. Enough said
• Intuitive Explanations - Wonderful math explainers for calculus and linear algebra
• Joel On Software - Classic wide-ranging blog on software, teams, and work
• Josh Thompson - Everything from urban parking to finding a remote job
• Julia Evans - Zines, life advice, and technical posts. Incredible human
• Julia Silge - Tidymodels champion. Neat posts on R and predicting home prices
• Kate Rose Morley - Simple games, data viz, and CSS tricks
• Marianne Bellotti - Computer science ∪ government ∪ management
• Nick Babcock - Lessons on performance + some viz stuff
• Nikita Prokopov - Creator of Fira Code. Posts on software performance and design
• The Pragmatic Engineer - Huge collection of useful career and programming advice
• Tom Ryder - Sys admin stuff and all things Unix, shell, and terminal
• Vicki Boykis - ♥ Data science, ML, R stuff, books, and essays

Spatial

• Katie Jolly - Maps and geography tips for R
• Kyle Walker - Creator of tidycensus, mapper extraordinaire
• Paul Ramsey - Weird, weedsy posts on PostGIS performance
• Topi Tjukanov - Utterly useless (but beautiful) map visualizations

Posts and articles

These posts have inspired or influenced me in some way. They’re things I reread and share with others. I tend to like concise posts (lists) or posts that graphically explain something complicated.

Chicago

• Portrait of Chicago: Uptown - History of Uptown. A little dated, but still well-done
• Scenes from Chicago’s Ewing Annex Hotel - Stories from one the last SROs
• UChicago’s Secret Places - Cool photos and urbex on the UChicago campus

Life

• 100 Tips for a Better Life - ♥ Things I wish I’d known at 20
• Don’t End the Week With Nothing - Make things you can show
• Doing a Job - ♥ The best thing ever written on how to work and lead
• Embrace the Grind - Sometimes you just have to do the boring stuff
• How Complex Systems Fail - Short, prescient read on why things break
• Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System - How to make things break
• The Illustrated Guide to a Ph.D. - Visual perspective on what a Ph.D. really means
• Stop Learning - You know enough, start doing things
• Work Hard - After a certain level, there are no shortcuts for effort

Coding and tech

• All the Best Engineering Advice I Stole From Non-Technical People - Big wisdom
• Choose Boring Technology - Stop reinventing ssh and grasping for shiny things
• Drunk Post: Things I’ve learned as a Sr Engineer - Strong opinions, mostly true
• FAANG Interview Advice - Good general interview advice, not just for FAANG
• Fast Software, the Best Software - Speed > lots of features
• I Wish My Web Server Were in the Corner of My Room - Mix virtual and physical
• The Infrastructure of a One-Man SaaS - Load balancing and AWS and K8s
• Kaminsky DNS Vulnerability - ♥ The most engaging thing ever written on DNS
• The Local Minima of Suckiness - How I think about teaching and learning coding
• The Rise of User-Hostile Software - Software now is better for devs, worse for users
• Teaching Programming - Extremely helpful tips for teaching a class how to code
• The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS - Tools and frameworks oh my
• The Tech Stack of a One-Woman Hardware Company - Microcontrollers and C
• Thoughts After 6 Years - ♥ Short post on lessons learned. Inspired my post
• The Website Obesity Crisis - ♥ Why does reddit load 15 MB on every page
• The World’s Smallest Hash Table - Optimizing code beyond all reason
• What I’ve Learned in 45 Years in the Software Industry - People > technology

Data

• Building a Data Team at a Mid-Stage Startup - The DS experience, a short story
• CLI Tools Can Be 235x Faster Than Your Hadoop Cluster - awk > hadoop
• Data Science Is Different Now - DS has a supply bubble and schools aren’t helping
• Engineers Shouldn’t Write ETL - They should write tools and platforms
• Good Data Scientist, Bad Data Scientist - ♥ What makes a great DS anyways?
• The Modern Data Stack - Where things are and where they’re going

Visualization

• Building Your Color Palette - Systemic approach for picking colors for UIs
• Cell Tower Distribution - Beautiful post on cell tower data viz
• Compressing and Enhancing Hand-Written Notes - Shrink those scans
• Ditherpunk - ♥ Monochrome image dithering and how it works
• Mechanical Watch - ♥ One of the most technically and visually impressive treatments of a complex topic I’ve ever seen

Math

• The Bitter Lesson - Computation power and general methods > complex methods
• The Most Important Statistical Ideas of the Past 50 Years - Stats summary
• The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics - Plus Hamming’s response

Other

• The American Abyss - Long political essay on Jan. 6th and how we got there
• How to Gain More From Your Reading - Tips for attentive, intentional reading
• MMAcevedo - Horrifying short fiction on the perils of saving a brain’s state
• The Plague Year - Summary of the institutional failures that made COVID so bad
• Some Blogging Myths - The most motivating post on blogging I’ve ever found
• The Tyranny of Structurelessness - All groups develop informal structure
• Your Climbing Shoes Are Too Tight - Treat your feet right, don’t size down

Software

These are the things I use every day. It’s a list whittled down over about 5 years. It’s not exhaustive, but it’s pretty close; I still use other stuff like Word and Teams 💀.

I have a strong preference for software that is fast, outwardly simple, and that does one thing extremely well.

Mobile

• ALL - Bitwarden - Open-source password manager. Great CLI integration
• iOS - Brew Timer - Coffee brewing timer for V60 and Aeropress
• ALL - Down Dog - Procedurally-generated at-home yoga and HIIT
• AND - Loop Habit Tracker - Minimal, yet feature-rich and flexible habit tracker
• ALL - Mountain Project - Find crags and track climbs, works offline
• AND - Niagara Launcher - ♥ Minimalist, fast, well-designed launcher
• iOS - Raivo OTP - iCloud-based MFA with the ability to export to an archive file
• iOS - Streaks - Good design and integrations. Pay once for multiple platforms
• ALL - Todoist - ♥ To-do list I’ve used for over a decade. Simple design, great UX
• ALL - YNAB - Straightforward budgeting with bank and brokerage integration

Desktop

• MAC - Alfred - Customizable Spotlight alternative with great plugins
• MAC - Focus - Block everything distracting then allow timed breaks
• MAC - IINA - Minimal Mac-only alternative to VLC
• MAC - Pandan - Notifies you how long you’ve been using your computer
• MAC - Swish - ♥ Resize and move windows with super intuitive gestures
• ALL - Obsidian - ♥ Fast notes. Free, works everywhere, plain markdown
• ALL - RStudio - Great IDE specifically for R (and now some Python)
• MAC - Transmit - Fast, versatile file transfer utility
• ALL - VS Code - Big IDE for when neovim or RStudio don’t cut it
• WIN - Terminal + WSL 2 - ♥ Linux virtualization on Windows that just works

Other

• FreshRSS - Free, self-hosted RSS feed aggregator. Lightweight, fast, and simple
• JetBrains Mono - Monospaced font with ligatures. Works in nearly every editor
• Parquet - Fast, space-efficient columnar storage format
• Postgres - Preferred RDBMS for any big project with structured data
• PostGIS - Spatial data extension for Postgres
• SQLite - The go-to DB engine for any small project that requires SQL
• WireGuard - ♥ Miracle VPN. Crazy fast and easy-to-use
• ZFS - Filesystem for storage pooling and management

CLI tools

• ffmpeg - Multimedia toolkit for just about everything
• fzf - ♥ Blazingly fast fuzzy finding. Why cd when you can Alt-C?
• hugo - Simple, self-contained static site builder. Used to make this site
• neovim - Text editor of choice. Config and plugins also work with vim
• ripgrep - ♥ grep but better. Search every file in a directory in milliseconds
• stow - Symlink, config, and dotfiles management
• tmux - Terminal multiplexer + keep remote terminal sessions alive
• z - Tiny bash utility that lets you jump between commonly-used directories
• zstd - Compression algorithm of choice. Replaced bzip2 as a favorite

R packages

• data.table - ♥ Impossible data manipulation magic. Faster than everything else
• dplyr - Clear, intuitive data munging that plays well with other Tidyverse libraries
• lubridate - Intuitive, consistent date-time handling. Save yourself from footguns
• ggplot2 - The plotting lib for R. Blows matplotlib (and many others) out of the water
• r5r - Robust, realistic transportation routing using Conveyal’s R5 engine
• renv - Wonderful environment/package manager for R (finally)
• sf - Geospatial manipulation, maps, and geometry features
• tidycensus - Useful interface for the Census API
• tidytransit - GTFS feed reader. Make trains go brrr

Last updated 2023-08-03