The essays in this pair are smaller in scope than the last group, but they hit close to home if you build things for a living.
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The Slow Death of the Power User: This essay argues that two decades of platform design choices have taught a generation not to understand its own tools. Its examples include the absence of a user-accessible filesystem on iOS for more than a decade and Android’s gradual restrictions on sideloading and bootloader access. The author believes the effect has reached developers who rarely leave managed abstractions. The argument connects technical literacy with meaningful consent: a privacy policy is hard to evaluate when the underlying system is inaccessible.
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First 10k Month From SaaS, 4 Areas of Focus, and a Mental Model for Growing a New SaaS: Justin Butlion’s monthly update covers his bootstrapped SaaS portfolio crossing $10,000 in monthly revenue for the first time, mostly through Monday.com marketplace apps. His “four areas of focus” model limits him to four active projects and rejects work outside them. I am going to try the same constraint on my side projects.
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The House Is Valuable Because It Is the House: Ethan Marcotte reflects on redesigning his personal site after The New Yorker described the aesthetic sameness of LLM-generated websites, including beige backgrounds and rusty orange accents. He chose texture over forced novelty: hand-picked typefaces that mix old and new, a watercolor motif, and a relief map adapted from a mountain near where he grew up. His redesign asks a practical question that has become more urgent: does this site look distinctly mine?