A batch about making things and running things: the business and craft of building, plus one detour into history.
Cate Huston’s The Joy of Scope Creep is a disciplined person’s confession. She normally follows the rule that “the feature you don’t build is the feature you don’t maintain,” yet one piece of marketing copy turned into several days of redesigning a site, its design system, the 404 page, three courses, and logged-in views. The detour worked, and the first sale arrived through the new design. Her colleague Jean describes this as productive scope creep because every side quest reveals where the tools work and where they fail.
John Nunemaker’s People Buy From People collects notes from his second Code with Jason appearance. He explains why he bought Fireside, how network deals differ from marketplace listings, and why he financed the purchase against home equity at 5–6% instead of using an SBA loan at 10–12%. He treats support as part of the product and will sometimes ship a fix before replying. His other ideas include an opinionated, inexpensive APM that precomputes common answers and “ops without a UI” through an API, CLI, and MCP access for Claude. The notes are practical reading for anyone interested in small software businesses.
Jason Zweig’s Three Ways to Get Paid examines how compensation structures shape behavior. His career as a Wall Street Journal personal-finance columnist has taught him that payment models reveal a great deal about the advice someone gives. The same question works outside finance: asking how a person gets paid can clarify incentives behind technical advice too.
Kiran Pfitzner’s The Kaiser and a “Mediocre Man” Theory of History is the outlier in this batch. He combines “great man” history with explanations based on impersonal forces: ordinary, often incompetent people can still occupy positions of extraordinary importance. Kaiser Wilhelm II is his case study. The Kaiser’s capriciousness, control over personnel, and inconsistent policy helped drive Germany’s diplomatic isolation before World War I. The essay warns against assuming that historical outcomes came from coherent, rational plans.
Piper Haywood’s Reflections on Running a Self-Hosted Personal Site in 2026 describes the growing maintenance cost of a personal site: bandwidth creep, email and comment spam, daily attack-rate notices, and AI bots archiving personal material such as birth stories. She plans to route traffic through Cloudflare, add WAF rules for scanners and login attempts, block unwanted SEO and AI bots from sensitive categories, reduce exposed email addresses, and consider ASN blocks. The piece works as both a lament and a runbook, and it pairs directly with Heather Burns’s rewilding essay in the next list.