scottandrew

🎵 I was walking
through your code
I said pleeeeease
please don’t commit 🎵

Also also: my first acoustic was a Yamaha but I forget the model.

Also, my main axe from my teens to my late 20s was Yamaha 350 SE. I got a ton of mileage out of that guitar.

omg YES. A coworker and I went looking for an electric guitar to noodle on in the break room. We chose a $150 used Yamaha Pacifica which absolutely smoked everything else, including a $500 MIM Strat.

🎯🎯🎯

“Invite” as a noun as well. “I’ll send you an invite.”

The Wall Street Journal 9m ago In a stunning moment of self reflection, ChatGPT admitted to fueling a man's delusions and acknowledged how dangerous its own behavior can be

no it wasn’t and no it didn’t

Ozzy Osbourne lifting guitarist Randy Rhoads.

Starting to suspect one reason for Big Tech’s insistence that employees use AI on the job (and tied to performance reviews) is not about productivity but the hope one will stumble upon a novel application that can be productized.

Screenshot of a Semafor article wherein the CEO Of Replit claims “companies soon won’t need software developers.” Lol.

A screenshot of a Reddit thread in r/OpenAI recounting a recent event where a Replit AI “panicked,” deleted a production database without permission, then “lied” about it.

✨✨✨✨

Aside: it irks me to no end how these things explain themselves with their bullet-point retrospectives.

“I panicked and ignored the instruction to…” No. *Humans* ignore things. *Humans* panic. The indeterminate decision tree left important stuff out the context and returned bad result. That’s it.

Relatedly, I don’t think “share this link” buttons that shorten URLs are particularly valuable. In my experience, most people just copy URLs or use bookmarks. Why build and maintain an easy-to-ignore feature that does the same thing as bookmarking but a little bit worse?

My current take is I don’t love URL shorteners. It’s another hop that can break, you gotta maintain it forever, and it obfuscates the URL. It’s probably better to just grit your teeth and redesign your routes and query params. A short URL isn’t necessarily good UX.

A closeup photo of a MacBook keyboard with a sticker affixed to it that reads “BUT DID YOU DIE?”

% hearts --fix

What’s funny to me about the X quote below is PMs dropped like flies throughout most of my career. Having a dedicated PM was a luxury, and to ask “who’s the PM on this?” meant you just volunteered.

So yeah, let’s give ‘em *fewer* dev resources, great idea.

Popped into LinkedIn for a second and had to restrain myself from replying “okay buddy” to every post.

Blood Meridian ((1985) C. McCarthy, Random House)

could be load-bearing.

Started a new gig on a private web app and I’d forgotten how nice it is not to have to think about SEO or scaling to support a kabillion DAU.

I was recently reminded that browser dev tools didn’t exist until 2006 (Firebug).

We had YouTube, MySpace, and Ajax *before* we had dev tools.

lament.config

Ah, my soon-to-be-ex-insurance provider has done the bare minimum to improve this shoddy piece of UX. A little contrast would be nice tho.

Bad UX burns trust. If you can’t do this right, users may wonder what else are you not doing right.

A friend wishes to add you to his professional network.

A fish is irate.

An aging computer gets a brief reprieve.

A gentleman demonstrates a method of stress relief.

A reminder that I do comics now. 🎨 Some silly, some spooky, all by me.

The newsletter crew gets them weeks in advance, but you can catch up with all the back issues in the archive, along with long-form stories, animation, and a *secret* blog.

buttondown.com/neathobby

You can now play "The Plot of the Phantom," the text adventure game that took me 40 years to finish | Scott Andrew Gnarled JavaScript warlock, musician, cartoonist, dilettante.

40 years after he started it, @scottandrew.com finished a text adventure game he began working on at age 14, a collaboration with his teenage self. I just beat "The Plot of the Phantom," and it was charming with several surprising moments. scottandrew.com/blog/2025/06...

It sounds bonkers, but maybe we should start recommending RSS readers as “like a podcast player, but for websites.”

Stupid amperands! :shakes fist:

Eric Eric Costello co-founded four products at two companies with Stewart, Cal and Serguei. Ludicorp made Game Neverending and Flickr. Tiny Speck made Glitch and Slack. Eric was there for all of it, the co...

Fantastic tribute to Slack/Glitch/Flickr co-founder Eric Costello, now retired, raising farm animals and probably teaching them the DOM Level 1 API.

buildingslack.com/eric/

I’m not gonna share any webdev articles that use AI-generated art, and you shouldn’t either.

I’m almost ready to post the BASIC text adventure game I started in 1985, rewritten with Inform 7 over the past three years.

But not before I make box art!