I expected to learn a lot of interesting things while onboarding at Webflow this week, but Webflow Design Language (WFDL) caught me off guard. I didn't have a purely functional programming language based on a lambda calculus with a Hindley–Milner type system on my bingo card — but there it is, and it’s a delightfully elegant solution.

Building an engineering platform starts by listening with a product mindset, not a project one. A platform is built with developers, for developers, and adoption will be a consequence of saving work and eliminating frustration, not the result of a command or mandate. When a developer watches a demo and says “I want that!” then you’ve won.

Earlier this year, I gave an interview about Tomcat and had fun going down memory lane. While preparing, I discovered that much of the material about Tomcat's origins has disappeared from the web. So I decided to do something about it and wrote about what happened from my perspective — from Daiquiri Summer to the JavaOne announcement.

Daniel Miessler points out that companies spending trillions to enable “just do it myself” looks smart in comparison to the $70 trillion spent annually for knowledge worker compensation. The unsettling question is: what happens to an economy built on labor when labor becomes optional? After all, nobody is obligated to create jobs.

I love Bryan Cantrill’s framework for LLM use at Oxide, grounded in the company’s values. He observes that there’s a social contract between readers and writers about the amount of work that has gone into a piece, and that LLM-generated prose breaks this contract. It maps to my own belief that LLMs should be used to make work better, not necessarily faster.

When I was an architecture student in school, deconstructivism was the buzz of the day and Frank Gehry was one of our prophets. His Vitra Design Museum in Germany was a building that I studied and loved. And even though I went a different way with my career, I’ve always greatly enjoyed his work including the Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Guggenheim Bilbao. What a great architect.

From the department of I did not see that coming: Jarred Sumner has announced that Anthropic is acquiring Bun. The expected path was cloud hosting. But then AI started getting good, Jarred got hooked on Claude Code — which is itself built on Bun now — and a few weeks ago he went on a four-hour walk with Boris from the Claude Code team to talk about joining forces. It’s a bit crazy, but it might just work.

For the last twelve years, Vancouver has been an amazing base for the main TED conference. The city is a generous host and I always enjoy my time there. But if TED has a home anywhere, it’s in California where it started in Monterey and then spent many years in Long Beach. Now, TED is going home to California, this time to San Diego. I’m really looking forward to it.

Congratulations to all my colleagues at Shopify who helped power another record setting Black Friday. Shopify processed $6.2 billion of sales, up 25% from last year, and peaked at 489 million requests per minute on the edge. That’s some serious scale, but more importantly it represents the collective economic activity of millions of merchants, many of them small businesses.

What if instead of sending prompts to an almost unimaginable matrix of floating point numbers to disappear, we sent them to a thermal printer in a countryside workshop and answered each one by hand? Pablo Declan’s charming video brings that idea to life, a unique take on the entire act of prompting.

Henry Oliver writes that the evolution of readable English wasn’t so much about writing shorter sentences as it was the emergence of logical syntax. A focus on writing in a plain style. This started in the 16th and 17th centuries with the emergence of writing that prioritized clarity over ornamentation. Modern prose feels different largely because we now write more like we speak, not because sentences are shorter.

After reinventing how creative work gets funded with Kickstarter, Yancey Strickler is back. This time, his aim is to fix the messy, ill-fitting business structures creators rely on. He proposes an “Artist Corporation” business structure designed for the realities of modern creative career. I’m intrigued.