Justin Duke
@jmduke
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Founder @buttondown . Partner @thirdsouthcap .
richmond, virginia · he/him
Joined February 2009
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Notes on two years of being an independent technologist. (LMK if I missed anything!)
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congratulations to this google docs PM who is singlehandedly responsible for engendering more developer goodwill than any other individual at Alphabet in the past five years
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A fairly paradigmatic example of:
1. the system working as intended
2. why you should never, ever, ever buy email addresses
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I think I've told this story before, but: my first month at Stripe, a senior eng on my team (thanks Patrick!) noticed me print-debugging, pulled up a chair and said "we are going to spend the next hour getting you comfortable actually using a debugger."
Probably the single
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a technology company that doesn't get discussed enough as admirable and inspiring is JetBrains, which makes high-quality software under a sustainable revenue model
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Had to get a little piece of history; here in Dulles during the largest IT outage in human history.
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this isn't even nitpicking, this is just bad analysis. almost every tech company's long-term ploy is to leverage their platform lock-in and replace one side of the marketplace with their own supply.
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I reserve a special level of animosity towards industries like cold email whose ability to generate "value" comes largely from their ability to snooker well-intentioned but naive business owners (like the person quoted above)
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this UI feels viscerally like three separate PMs are vying for my clicks
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I've witnessed two attempts to do carte blanche style "whole codebase" rewrites in my career: both failed, even though the people involved were uniformly brilliant and well-intentioned.
Don't do it. Don't even think about doing it. If you're really confident that it's the right
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@andrew__rea
i believe it was
@gbrl_dick
who informed me that in australia they call these a "bachelor's handbag", in case you needed more reason to buy them
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if you squint, 90% of every codebase is just state machines, bulk actions, (de)serialization, and access control
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would throw so much money at a tool that made typescript errors look like this (sane, legible, pleasant) not forbidden arcana
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@CodingGarden
The obvious answer is B, right, because `onChange` and `value` are part of the HTML spec?
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There are a couple days left, so: I urge you, deeply urge you, to write a few hundred words reflecting on the year you've had and the year you hope to have. I've been doing this for almost a decade and let me tell you, the solipsism is very rewarding.
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Looking at Langchain's source and discovering it is largely just duct tape has made me permanently suspicious of every single non-baremetal AI company; if a startup starts talking about "agentic workflows" I immediately assume the buzzwords are meant as sleight-of-hand.
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An essay that I've sent many people and re-read many times over the past four years: Work on what matters, by
@Lethain
.
Waited too long in my career to do meaningful work, but making up for lost time now.
Don't repeat my mistake. Life is short and the universe only gets one chance to know you.
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I am a little confused by the growing prominence of "drawers" as an interface pattern — it seems like a novelty/gimmick (not that there's anything wrong with that!) that's strictly worse than centrally-positioned dialogs.
What am I missing? (I ask this sincerely, since the
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stripe soft-launched pay-what-you-want payment links, which means i get to delete a whole slew of code
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Pretty remarkable (in a good way) how little GitHub's core design system has evolved in a decade.
First screenshot taken in 2013; second one in 2023!
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My condolences to the Dropbox Paper PM.
well... that's something new. Google Docs supports code blocks now.
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@stevekovach
this is me in fourth grade when i discovered that i could run "thesaurus" in Microsoft Word on every word in my essay
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Life update: having a kid in October. 🥰
(Let the record reflect that including Telemachus in this photo was not my idea, but he's quite excited too.)
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No such thing as a free lunch, but even if you have a team size of one I recommend starting a decision log — not just to capture decisions you've made but as a repository of decisions you need to make.
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i am an absolute sucker for every single "markdown-ish DSL for pernsickety layouts" tool out there, and this is no exception
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Okay, all the data people I've been following have been yapping about DuckDB for a while and I kind of assumed it was Not For Me.
On a lark, I just tried exporting my entire OLAP events table (~100M rows, 20g) and throwing it at it and uh. I get the hype now.
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A (Southern-coded, I guess?) thing about me: I find CEOs loudly complaining about high serverless bills, bad freelancers, getting hit by platform risk, etc. distasteful — not because that stuff doesn't suck (it does!) but because it belies a fundamental unseriousness
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idea: a todo list whose UI presents as the diablo II inventory system, forcing you to tetris-ify your priorities
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Making a tiny little project during my lunch break. Any PDFs I'm missing?
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my personal version of this trick is starting every document with “Okay, so, the thing is” to kick my brain into writing with my voice and not that of a disembodied author
writing trick: sometimes when I write down an explanation of a technical concept, I accidentally use a lot of confusing jargon
But if I try to explain it out loud to an actual person, often the explanation that comes out is MUCH more clear, and then I can just write that down
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not to be too schmaltzy, but Buttondown is in many ways a years-long thesis that a different type of software company — a neighborhood café rather than an industrial kitchen — can work, and is good for everyone
and to that extent, this week has been incredibly rewarding.
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Embarrassing confession: I'm one of those "retroactively mark up your google calendar to track time spent" people.
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officially reached the age at which i am not just enthused but _thrilled_ at the discovery of Google Sheets' support for embedded visualizations
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I can't believe it's taken me this long to do this.
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everyone should keep a list of their favorite essays. mine is here:
I've lost track of the number of people I sent the B-lane essay to. It's one of my foundational texts, along with these
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Here is a good sign that PagerDuty is ripe for disruption: its empty state in a core onboarding workflow references HipChat despite HipChat shutting down in 2019.
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@ikasliwal
i think not wanting to change your primary branch from “master” is actually a very useful shibboleth because it identifies those who object to improvements purely on ideological grounds, even and especially if it requires no actual labor or difficulty whatsoever
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Feel like all of these are uncontroversial, obviously true statements:
· The product surface area of Twitter has not meaningfully improved in the past nine months
· Stability is worse
· Ad inventory quality is worse
· Content quality (what the 'algorithm' favors, bots) is worse
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One of the things that I cannot emphasize enough: you really, really do not need to keep on top of bleeding-edge front-end trends unless your goal is to monetize (through consulting, devrel, or infoproducts) your understanding of bleeding-edge front-end trends.
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the only complaint i have this about exceptional essay is that it purports to be about iOS. it’s probably the best design writing i’ve read in the last few years
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I think we're at the point where there's sufficient room + appetite for an aggressively editorialized version of Product Hunt. Feels like it's shifted a little too far towards being a marketing channel as opposed to being an actual to learn about new products
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It takes a tremendous amount of either industry inexperience or bad faith to contort a point about "traditional architectures will scale you really far" into "this is a number comparable to techempower benchmarks"
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this is also particularly good advice for software engineering.
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@simonsarris
"Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect." — Raymond Joseph Teller
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The best manager I've ever had was essentially absent from all technical discussions; the worst manager I've had was one of the best engineers I've ever worked with.
Management is a deeply distinct praxis from craft.
People mock PMs all the time but engineering management is just as broken. We've allowed people who can't even code to politic themselves into positions of power, driving down quality and creativity across the industry. Talented engineers are suffering under non-technical
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Not to sound anodyne but have you ever felt your entire worldview and sense of self completely transform in real time?
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*Merges PR*
What a night
*Phone buzzes*
And a text? Killing it
*checks phone*
ok that was the deploy notification but still cruising
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i think this is true; i think it's also true that living close to family is spiritually nourishing, that commutes waste time and wither the soul, and that the easiest way to destroy 99% of your candidate pool is to mandate they live in a given location
Offices lead to greater connection, inspiration, community, productivity, and even wellbeing.
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I swear there's a tool that lets me do:
localhost:8000 → application.local
localhost:3000 → marketing.local
localhost:3002 → docs.local
But I can't for the life of me remember the name of it. Does anyone know what I'm talking about?
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After six years, Spoonbill — my first SaaS — is no more.
I wrote a eulogy, including:
· How I essentially upcycled an existing product
· Stumbling my way into my first enterprise contract
· Learning the hard way about platform risk
I hope you enjoy it.
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Reposting a comment I made on HN yesterday.
I think the proliferation of success porn on Indie Hackers, podcasts, et al have warped folks expectations on traction a little bit.
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prefixing your search term with "reddit" is a 2021 googling superpower in much the same way using exact quotes was a 2011 googling superpower
Wirecutter moving behind a paywall is very funny because Gearlab has been kicking one part of that site’s ass for a decent while now and because I can just google “Reddit OLED 2021” and get a much more up-to-date result.
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one thing that has been pretty cool about the past twenty years is that you can find blog posts from the founders of billion-dollar startups about learning to code.
i think it's very important to the industry that this remains true.
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general call: if you're a super-early-career engineer interested in doing some part-time (~10-15 hrs/wk) full-stack dev work (python, vue, react), please slide into my DMs. i can offer you:
· boring (but real) problems
· helpful PR comments
· cheer & bonhomie
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my brain when someone sends me a nice email about my silly newsletter tool that i built because i was sick of using tinyletter
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i think for every tweet you do about tech journalism and/or venture capital you should immediately read one poem as penance
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Mondays at 22: This weekend was great; I started a new side project, learned a new framework, and went out to three new cocktail bars
Mondays at 27: This weekend was great; I went for a walk and ate a a very nice apple
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This is — I don't think I'm exaggerating — the best SaaS advertisement I've seen in the past decade. A work of art in conversation with its ancestors!
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day one of unemployment and i'm already baking scones. at this rate i'm going to rebuild my blog twice by the end of the month
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if you’ll permit me a tiny bit of schmaltz: this past week, two things happened
1. Pulitzer Prize winner
@edyong209
started writing on Buttondown
2. 79-year old sent in the attached feedback
building software feels really, really good
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Friends: the only thing that made me better at interviewing for jobs was interviewing for jobs.
To that end, I've blocked off 5pm—6pm EST M-F for the rest of the year for mock interviews. Happy to give either a technical or non-technical interview:
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Buttondown's outgoing intern (who was behind every single good thing that happened to the editor in the past few months — footnotes, LaTeX, Fancy mode, Unsplash, emojis, and a few more surprises) stayed ten minutes late on their final day to add a unit test.
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I am extremely curious about the efficacy of LogRocket's content marketing strategy, which afaict is "just have a passably high-quality tutorial for every single possible technical topic that a developer might search."
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@WillManidis
the average tech employee is a 35-year old parent of two writing J2EE and has no idea what y combinator is
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@charliermarsh
for me personally, it's that i need to expand to third or perhaps even fourth-order thinking. second-order is just not cutting it these days
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Pretty much the perfect price-hike email, IMO:
· what the change is
· when it kicks in
· why it's happening
· sympathetic without being smarmy
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The entire MKBHD discourse is a nothingburger (his critics are a tiny, unserious minority) but it does serve as a good example of a broader issue: the industry largely considers tech journalism to be a marketing channel, and sponsorship disclosure laws are woefully behind
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cc
@vebaccount
what are posts that aren’t load-bearing anywhere but your personal lexicon. like the ones that weren’t really popular but are so enshrined in your mind that you just assume they got hundreds of thousands of likes
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i promise this will be the first and last time this month i wade into discourse
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