Jim Nielsen

  1. Grow, Like a Tree Not a Cancer

    As ever, Mandy Brown casually drops a blog post that makes you examine the everyday meaning of words: One of the imperatives in contemporary, professional work culture is to “grow.” There is often a sense of height or largeness with that imperative, as if growth must be measured in your distance up the…

    Published

  2. Malicious Traffic and Static Sites

    I wrote about the 404s I serve for robots.txt. Now it’s time to look at some of the other common 404s I serve across my static sites (as reported by Netlify’s analytics): /wp-login.php /wp-admin /news/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml /login/ /wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml /news/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml …

    Published

  3. Notes From an Interview With Jony Ive

    Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe, interviewed Jony Ive at Stripe Sessions. Below are my notes from watching the interview. I thought about packaging these up into a more coherent narrative, but I just don’t have the interest. However, I do want to keep these notes for possible reference later, so here’s…

    Published

  4. My Number One “Resource Not Found”

    The data is in. The number one requested resource on my blog which doesn’t exist is: /robots.txt According to Netlify’s analytics, that resources was requested 15,553 times over the last thirty days. Same story for other personal projects I manage: iOS Icon Gallery: 18,531 requests. macOS Icon Gallery…

    Published

  5. Podcast Notes: Feross Aboukhadijeh on The Changelog

    I enjoyed listening to Feross Aboukhadijeh, founder and CEO of the security firm Socket, on the Changelog podcast “npm under siege”. The cat-and-mouse nature of security is a kind of infinite source of novel content, like a series of heist movies that never produces the same plot so you can never quite…

    Published

  6. Data Storage As Files on Disk Paired With an LLM

    I recently added a bunch of app icons from macOS Tahoe to my collection. Afterwards, I realized some of them were missing relational metadata. For example, I have a collection of iMove icons through the years which are related in my collection by their App Store ID. However, the latest iMovie icon I…

    Published

  7. Tahoe’s Terrible Icons: The B-Sides

    This post is a continuation of Paul Kafasis’ post “Tahoe’s Terrible Icons” where he contrasts the visual differences across a number of Apple’s updated icons in macOS Tahoe (a.k.a. the Liquid Glass update). While Paul’s post mostly covers icons for the apps you’ll find in the primary /Applications folder…

    Published

  8. Leveraging a Web Component For Comparing iOS and macOS Icons

    Whenever Apple does a visual refresh in their OS updates, a new wave of icon archiving starts for me. Now that “Liquid Glass” is out, I’ve begun nabbing the latest icons from Apple and other apps and adding them to my gallery. Since I’ve been collecting these icons for so long, one of the more interesting…

    Published

  9. Down The Atomic Rabbit Hole

    Over the years, I’ve been chewing on media related to nuclear weapons. This is my high-level, non-exhaustive documentation of my consumption — with links! 📖 The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. This is one of those definitive histories (it’s close to 1,000 pages and won a Pulitzer Prize…

    Published

  10. Browser APIs: The Web’s Free SaaS

    Authentication on the web is a complicated problem. If you’re going to do it yourself, there’s a lot you have to take into consideration. But odds are, you’re building an app whose core offering has nothing to do with auth. You don’t care about auth. It’s an implementation detail. So rather than spend…

    Published