I was recently part of a big parenting discussion group about whether a parent should allow her tween to have a smartphone with Snapchat. It produced a lot of stories and anecdotes and feelings and opinions, including a few tales of teens finding ways to circumventing parental controls or even picking up burner phones in order to be able to do things like keep up streaks. There were also some anecdotes of real-life consequences around location tracking, hazing, content getting shared and saved without consent, etc.

It was eye-opening and terrifying, because my kids are too young for this sort of thing today, but I’m sure the options will be even more overwhelming and difficult to manage by the time they’re this age. The social pressures in their and your peer group will influence what’s considered appropriate, regardless of any age listed for any terms of service, and there are so many things that are technically permitted but not exactly good for us in this world.

I wanted to take the time to formulate the long reply I had composed into a more publicly shareable blog post – which will likely come back to bite me in the ass! I’m sure things will shift between now and when my eldest hits iPhone age, but for now, my perspective on giving a 13yo a smartphone with Snapchat is a hard NO, and this is my reasoning why.

My daughter is already asking me for a phone for her eighth (!) birthday, and right now, it’s an easy no.

I understand that social media is obviously where all your friends are and you don’t wanna feel left out, but to me, there is no difference between using social media and using drugs or alcohol.

The thing I keep telling my kids with stuff like this (swearing, adult themes, etc.) is that it’s all about context.

There will come a time when you are able to fully understand the context of when to deploy an F-bomb.

There will come a time when I can’t shelter you from the maelstrom of crap that rains down on you from every direction on social media. I hope if you choose to engage with social media, you do so with the knowledge of both the benefits of these platforms (connectedness, sharing your life) and, more importantly, the detriments (data privacy, mental health struggles).

But yeah, for now: no phones. Sorry, gang. My number one job as a parent is to keep you safe, even if you aren’t happy with me.

Once you do things quietly you become selfish in the best way – using money to improve your life more than you try to influence other people’s perception of your life. I’d rather wake up and be able to do anything I want, with whom I want, for as long as I want, than I would try to impress you with a nice car.

It always seems to come back to your vision, no?

As soon as you have a vision, you can set your own scoreboards, play whatever game you want with whoever you want.

I am still working on improving my horrible relationship to money, but I’m glad I have a partner who constantly reminds me that it’s important to not put your entire life on hold because you’re stressed out about finances.

From what I’ve experienced so far in life, there’s never a point at which you dust your hands and say, “welp, I did it. I won the money game, and I’ll never need to stress about money ever again.”

So as long as you’re being smart with squirreling away money when you can, you should feel empowered to buy things that make your life better.¹

Fathers have a direct, positive impact on the social, emotional, and cognitive development of their children, and this shows up in measures of educational achievement, social skills, and long-term mental health. While fathers do more paid work, and perform less childcare overall than mothers, they play a unique and complementary role in child raising.

While they play an essential role at all stages of a child’s life from infancy to adulthood, their presence seems especially influential as they grow older. A father’s closeness to his child in middle childhood and adolescence protects against loneliness and depressive symptoms, particularly in girls. Sixteen-year-old girls who are close to their fathers have better mental health at 33. Controlling for many other factors, the adolescent delinquency rate for boys is lower when they have involved fathers.

First off, a happy belated Father’s Day to my fellow dads, cool uncles, and other father figure-types out there. It isn’t just biological dads who need the shout outs; if there’s a kid in your life that you care about, then you should get your flowers as well.

Second, ever since we had our first child, I have looked forward to the current stage that both of my children are at.

I’ve never been one to see a baby and melt into a ball of baby talk and snuggles.

But I sure am down for teaching my kids how to apply the ultimate chinlock, ride a bike, catch a ball, step outside of their comfort zone, and cope with tough feelings.

I’m just glad that I found some empirical evidence to validate my unsubstantiated thoughts around fatherhood.

I won’t argue that smartphones are significantly responsible for America’s sense of economic malaise. What they are is unusually helpful for understanding and interpreting this malaise in common terms. They’re a heightened, sped-up microcosm of the weird, sour vibrancy of the economic moment, little worlds in which participants are both increasingly active and increasingly worried. By most measures, the smartphone economy is booming, and yet it also feels like shit in a way that everyone can feel for themselves, together, no matter what soda they drink.

That’s the thing with creating these cool slot machines that live in our pocket: they’re really fun at first, but once you’re addicted to them, you keep going back even when it’s painful.

That pain hasn’t manifested for me much by way of exorbitant pricing, although I have noticed my subscriptions for things like iCloud storing are increasing.

The way this manifests for me is when my kids look at me and say, “can you snuggle and watch this episode with me without being on your phone?”

I know it’ll hurt, but I gotta make the switch to my Light Phone soon. I’m sick of feeling hopelessly addicted to this dumb piece of glass I’m currently typing on while my kids are playing in the water park in front of me.

The invention of the wheel is often put forward as a pinnacle of human ingenuity, but it strikes me that the defining characteristic of modern transportation systems is not the wheel but the pneumatic tire.

I was biking with my kids up to a splash pad earlier this week when I heard a pop beneath me.

I let the kids get splashing while I investigated my bike, and I found that there was a huge bulge in my back tire.

It caused the tire to have such a severe warp that I had to ride home (slowly) with my rear breaks detached.

So it’s fitting that I came across this article in my Instapaper queue explaining the history of the pneumatic tire.

There are loads of good details about tire manufacturing in here, but one of the more surprising things I learned: as late as 1570, the number of four wheeled carriages in Britain could be counted on a single hand.

Reading this article gave me a lot of appreciation for the humble tire, and there’s no doubt I will have one of my favorite Simpsons bits stuck in my head all day.

Early in the morning on October 21, 2016, Scott Shapiro got out of bed, opened his Dell laptop to read the day’s news, and found that the internet was broken.

Not his internet, though at first it struck Shapiro that way as he checked and double-checked his computer’s Wi-Fi connection and his router. The internet.

This is a gripping tale of how a few nerdy kids were able to take down some giant pieces of the internet.

It’s also a story filled with redemption, coming to grips with what you’ve built, and how to atone for pain you’ve caused.

I can’t recommend this long read enough.

I have this dream for barefoot developers that is like the barefoot doctor.

These people are deeply embedded in their communities, so they understand the needs and problems of the people around them.

So they are perfectly placed to solve local problems.

If given access to the right training and tools, they could provide the equivalent of basic healthcare, but instead, it’s basic software care.

And they could become an unofficial, distributed, emergent public service.

They could build software solutions that no industrial software company would build—because there’s not enough market value in doing it, and they don’t understand the problem space well enough.

And these people are the ones for whom our new language model capabilities get very interesting.

Do yourself a favor and read this entire talk. Maggie articulated the general feeling I have felt around the promise of LLMs within the confines of a concise, inspiring talk.

A friend approached me a few months back and asked me to help him build an app to facilitate a game he likes to play with his friends in real life.

I told him that a good first step would be to experiment first with facilitating the game using good ol’ fashioned paper, and use the lessons learned from that experience to eventually build an app.

A few weeks later, he came to me with a fully baked version of the app in a prototyping tool called AppSheet.

I was stunned at how much he was able to get done without any professional development support.

He’s a prime example of a barefoot developer. I don’t think he has any interest in crossing the “command line wall,” but as these tools get more capable, it’ll enable him and scores of others to build software that’ll solve their problems for them.

Helping more “normal people” to become barefoot developers is a cause I’d love to be part of.

Last year, we decided to launch Tiny Awards, a small prize to celebrate interesting, small, craft-y internet projects and spaces which basically make the web a more fun place to be.

We hoped it would be a small contribution to celebrating ‘people making stuff on the internet for the fun of it and the love of it and the hell of it’. We were thrilled to see that people seemed to like the idea, so we’re doing it again in 2024 - still tiny, still celebratory, and still (hopefully) helping spread the word about some of the small, personal, whimsical, weird and poetic things people are making on what is left of the web.

Woohoo! Can’t wait to see the shortlist published on July 19th.

It's been a while since I used my own website as much as I did during this year's WeblogPoMo. The daily posting routine revealed some small annoyances which made visiting this site a little less fun.

For starters, I haven't redesigned this site since I got COVID back in 2021. 13 year old Tim would have been mortified at how long we've gone without a big redesign.

That's not to say I didn't try! I experimented with (and coded out) nearly a dozen different potential layouts.

The one I had the most fun with was a 90s Memphis style layout where the background elements were independent SVGs that were subtly animated.¹

The problem I'm realizing² is that I'm not a particularly skilled designer. I know what good design feels like, but I haven't taken the time to articulate what good design feels like.

The other problem? Building websites isn't fun for me anymore.

The tools you use to build websites are all essentially the same. There is functionally zero difference between a monolith Rails app running Postgres, a monolith Laravel app running MySQL, a static site generator powered by a Rube Goldberg-ian series of GitHub actions, or a GraphQL-powered React app.

The biggest casualty of choosing to build software professionally is my desire to learn new web technologies.

Instead of forcing myself to sit down and spoon-feed myself a puree in the form of a Next.JS tutorial, I'm leaning into other areas that interest me more.

Offline, that includes fixing up my house and lawn, writing, and being a better parent/husband.

Online, that includes playing with generative AI and sharing more of my thoughts on this blog and in my newsletter.

But even while I'm exploring other interests, that doesn't mean I can just let this site deteriorate and fill up with prickly weeds.

So over the last couple days, I made a couple small changes to this page that subtly improve the user experience. Most of these changes come in the form of discoverability.

When I launched this version of my site, I decided to lean into the linked list style of posting.

This was a great move because it's allowed me to (1) share interesting webpages with y'all, but also (2) make an archive of thoughts and ideas that inspire me.

Earlier this year, I added tags to all my posts. That process is what first made me realize that once I posted something on this site, it was next to impossible to find it again without jumping into a Rails console and searching for it.

Now that all of my posts have tags, I wanted a way to better visualize what topics I tended to think about and navigate through them.

If you visit the main page of this blog, you'll see a section at the top that explains what I tend to write about along with some groups of tags.³

I also made some slight CSS tweaks so the site looks even better on mobile.⁴

The main page is another source of stress for me over the past couple years.

As previously mentioned, my blog is mostly linked posts, but I do occasionally post longer essays and these shorter posts.

My main page had two separate sections to display my longer posts and my recent links, but these sorts of posts vanished into the ether.

My solution was to display a stream of all the posts along with their tags and an indication if it's a link post.

Like I said: these are small tweaks.

But small tweaks are sometimes all you need. It's important to maintain our virtual spaces.

Just because I'm not inspired to build new websites doesn't relieve me from the obligation to keep it functioning the best I possibly can.

And a positive consequence of these changes? You can expect more shorter posts from me like these!

Like many people I’ve been dealing with the collapses of the various systems I relied on for information over the previous decades. After 17 of using Twitter daily and 24 years of using Google daily neither really works anymore. And particular with the collapse of the social spaces many of us grew up with, I feel called back to earlier forms of the Internet, like blogs, and in particular, starting a link blog.

One of us! One of us!

This isn’t a lengthy post, but I damn near quoted the whole thing because Kellan makes great points about the state of information sharing, the collapse of the Web 2.0 social infrastructure we all used for twenty years, and lamenting the fact he doesn’t really consume media from a wide variety of sources (me too, friend).

If you’re reading my link blog here, consider starting one of your own. Make it low effort for yourself, but just start one and stick to it for a month.

I think you’ll find your media consumption habits begin to trend toward higher quality sources of information/entertainment.