I found it eye-opening in terms of understanding how municipal governments work in practice and how perverse incentives lead to poor community outcomes. It had a huge impact on the way that I think about where to live and what policies I support in local government.

This book complements Happy City in that both books explore what characteristics of a city make it attractive for residents to live there but also how legislation often yields the opposite results.

Have you ever used archive.org’s Internet Wayback Machine? It’s a free tool that’s been archiving the web since 1996. So, if you want to see what Google looked like in 1999, they’ve got it.

ArchiveBox is like your own, personal Internet Wayback Machine. It’s free and open-source, and you can use it to archive most websites.

All original writing and images on this blog are released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

That means you can republish the content or adapt it as long as you honor the license.

What you’re allowed to do

• Republish the content in any medium or format, even for commercial purposes.
• Adapt the content by changing the wording, translating it to other languages, or expanding on what I wrote.

What you’re required to do

If you republish, adapt, or translate content from this website, you’re required to:

Highlights

• I think about how I can do a better job delegating product decisions and documentation.
• I compare my experience learning Nix to learning Zig.

Goal grades

At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:

When I work in my own repositories these days, I always add a Nix flake to the repo so that I can spin up a working development environment on any system with a single command.

What do I do when I’m working in someone else’s repo and they don’t want to adopt Nix flakes?

Normally, I’d just add the file to my copy of the repo and gitignore it locally so I don’t commit my personally-specific files with the rest of my changes.