Riffing on the work started with Ask Rands, I’ve been spending the days before the holiday seasons polishing existing features while also building some new ones for the blog. Briefs If you’ve been watching the RSS feed for the past week, you’ve seen an increase in the number of posts. During the last major redesign… more
There is one. Wait, two. No, three. Ok, four humans who directly inspired my writing. (Ok, five.) The list is not in order of importance, but by time: Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (Fall 1988) Think what a better world it would be if we all—the whole world—had… more
Having been robot-wrangling for a solid year now, I continue to feel like they give me superpowers. However, like all of us, I have a front-row seat to increasingly attractive garbage the robots are capable of generating at scale. I like to think that I am human enough to detect the slop, but the rate… more
One of the more interesting robot-assisted tools I’ve built in the last few months is tracking the various metrics for Rands-related properties. Think social like Mastodon, BlueSky, and Threads. Think blog analytics like new users, session duration, and popular articles. I’ve been plopping this data into a spreadsheet every month for the last two years.… more
In the early days of this weblog, I was on MediaTemple using MoveableType for a good long time. Three things happened during these many years: MoveableType was mostly abandoned during this time. I’m sure well-intentioned folks were working on it (and it appears they still are), but the vibrancy of development had faded from my… more
When your favorite software tool receives a major update, it’s all dread. It’s not you expect them to ruin the application (although possible); it is because it’s your favorite tool, you know all the intricacies of how it works, and you know exactly how you need it to work. This is not a casual tool.… more
Frequently, I get a direct message from a community member on the Rands Leadership Slack pointing out a broken link on this weblog. I am happy to fix the link. I am not happy to reread what I wrote fourteen years ago because much of the early writing is… just awful. Unbearable, poorly punctuated, semi-coherent… more
It would appear there are not a lot of written words here recently. Appearances are deceiving. There are lots of words and they look like this: I’m winding up a three-week vacation which has been focused on getting the next book in shape. My definition of “in shape” is “I can kind’a sort’a see the… more
Awhile ago. I picked a font for a reason I’ve since forgotten. The typeface, Cyan, is unremarkable. Not a great body font and not a great headline font. I probably used it in a presentation once or twice, found it to be poorly kerned, and then moved on. However, the R, the lowercase R, somehow… more
Randomly think of a thing. Let it bump around your head a bit. If the bumping gets too loud, start writing the words with the nearest writing device. See how far you get. The more words usually mean a higher degree of personal interest. Stop when it suits you. Wait for time to pass and… more
