Five essays this time, about habits, craft, and responding to a noisy moment with clarity.
Nathan Barry’s 5 Things That Used to Matter is a short, opinionated newsletter from the Kit CEO. Detailed mid-level planning is mostly a way to delay starting. Curating your information feeds matters more than ever, don’t let algorithms surface the “world is ending” think pieces. Learning before doing is backwards; his son built a web-based video editor with Wispr Flow without wondering whether he knew enough to start. “Staying in your lane” made sense when doing it yourself meant doing it badly, but a designer just rebuilt OpenClaw in Swift because he didn’t like that it was written in TypeScript. The most provocative entry: you don’t always need to read your code before it ships, as long as the architecture holds and tests pass. I don’t fully agree with that one, but the framing is useful, each of these habits made sense in a context that has shifted, and re-examining them by default is more productive than following them by inertia.
Brian Schrader’s Take Better Notes by Hand makes a research-backed case for analog note-taking. Handwriting engages memory and comprehension more deeply than typing, partly because you can’t write as fast as you type, which forces you to synthesize as you go rather than transcribing verbatim. The essay doesn’t argue for abandoning digital tools; it argues for recognizing which mode of capture produces better thinking and choosing accordingly. I started keeping a paper notebook alongside my digital one after reading this, and the difference in how well I retain and connect ideas is noticeable.
Matt Mullenweg’s Taxonomist is a short reflection on categorization as a skill and a discipline. The WordPress co-founder thinks about how we organize information, how taxonomies shape what’s findable and what gets lost, and how the pressure toward flat, searchable structures has costs that hierarchical organization used to absorb. It’s a small piece, but it resonates if you’ve spent time thinking about content architecture or information design. In an era where “just search for it” is the default answer, intentional categorization still matters.
David Bushell’s I Quit, the Clankers Won is an April Fool’s post, and a good one. He “quits” web development because AI has made everything pointless, the bots write the code, the bots read the code, humans are just middlemen slowing down the pipeline. The satire works because it captures a feeling that’s genuinely in the air right now, even among people who are enthusiastic about AI tooling. Sometimes naming the anxiety through humor is more effective than another earnest think piece about it. Read it, laugh, feel seen, and then go build something.
Which brings us to Dave Rupert’s Make Something, the perfect follow-up. It’s short, sincere, and direct: the best response to the noise is to make something. Not to debate the tools. Not to position yourself. Just build a thing, a small thing, a personal thing, a thing nobody asked for. The essay reads like a note to self, and that’s exactly why it works. I keep it bookmarked for the days when the discourse is louder than the work.