One man's quest to hit as many walls in life as possible.
Cubs beat the Diamondbacks for their 11th consecutive win this season. The crowd is in on every opportunity to cheer for their home team or distract the contenders. Take me out to the ball game. More than 34,000 attendees showed up to throw the Diamondbacks off their game. 50/50 odds that the crowd was standing or sitting.
Tinkering in progress This is a prototype for future photography posts. It's taking me a minute to wrangle image compression, layout, etc. Let alone finding an enjoyable narrative thread. Marina District - Betty never misses out on crossing crosswalks on painted stripes only. Marina District - Shoes peeking through privacy glass. Crissy Field East Beach - Cleaned feet get a free ride back to the…
The first eBay haul: 30 well-curated cassettes, a Walkman WM-FX277, and a Maxell MXCP-P100. My partner and I have been trying on different ways to cut back on digital consumption. We got our kid an AM/FM radio last September, and it quickly became her favorite gadget of all time. She has a favorite radio station for different times of the day, a favorite morning talk show, opinions on the best pop…
Fresh deli color vibes, typography with extra wonk on a bed of digital garden, and served in a parchment-lined red plastic basket, and a tangy dill pickle spear on the side: Welcome to version 6. Designing for myself is always a real challenge. Every personal site I’ve ever made felt juvenile and under-thought , so I would stop development after the case studies were done. I’d pour my love for…
Regex is so powerful, but I’ve learned that learning Regex is the part of using Regex that you have to be into, because actually using Regex is seldom what you get to do with it.
Since January 2026, I’ve been printing emergency whistles with a Bambu Lab P1S . I’ve shipped them primarily to friends around the Twin Cities area in Minnesota. But by mid-February, Minneapolitans were up to their ears in whistles. Local businesses around Chicago can’t seem to keep them in stock, though. In progress Code and content are developing over time. Expect frequent changes, including…
A note from Future Bartz This was originally written and posted to Instagram in 2023. Hamas had attacked Israel and taken hostages, but Israel had not yet responded. Israel and Hamas have since agreed to displace and wipe out Palestinians and their territories, which is a fucking despicable response to a fucking despicable provocation. I stand by my words here, but I wish that anyone in power…
It’s version 5 of this kind of career-forward website for me, certainly not the fifth canonical version of my website. This is a project that I abandon and come back to more often than I’ll ever admit. Despite the façade of confidence and swagger, I think personal sites are monumental challenges for even the best designers, developers, writers, whoever decides to do this. It is deeply…
[Fig. 1] Cloud in the sky over Charlotte. April 2023 [Figs. 2 & 3] Pianodrome for Charlotte Shout. March 2023 I often can’t shake the looping thoughts on how I don’t do enough, I have not and will not amount to what I can do and who I can be. This is a chronic and human labor without easy remedy. Last week, though, I woke up remembering “go placidly,” the opening to a poem that used to be framed…
Editor's note In my off hours, I field requests for writing prompts and mail off typewritten letters to the requesters. This is a transcription about food that I mailed in February 2023, typos and all. Food is the universal language. It’s the ultimate form of expression without words. It’s a communication between the cook, their tools and stove, and their guests. In one evening, you can tell…
Editor's note Sometime in 2024, a change either to the CSS spec (unlikely) or my own CSS (100% what happened) invalidated the interaction behaviors described below. I might try to fix it someday. I also understand that the credit due for includes goes to a series of programming languages, not specifically Eleventy. Let’s do the demo first. If you just happen to be reading on a smartphone, I’m…
§ Performative social impact capitalism There is a rise of organizations choosing to use Pride and Black Lives Matter logo variations on their websites, while leaving their power to enact real positive change on the table. The internal messaging is often that it is important to the business to toe a moderate political line, but unironically highlight the increase in sales that their Juneteenth…
While we should always pick the right tool for the job, probably, these are the apps and hardware I’m using this year. § Design Sketch The first design tool since Photoshop CS that really stole my heart. Native performance is unparalleled, and official Apple Libraries make quick work of keeping pace with the Human Interface Guidelines . Figma You cannot deny the feature set of this thing. I can…
It’s officially warm out. North Carolina’s growing season started more than two months sooner than Minnesota, but we’re here for it. Winter is a time to shed old skin, to look out at the world and collect yourself, and plan. It can get exhausting though, so it’s important to take some time for things that tickle your brain. My top five for the season: 📚 Cal Flyn's hopeful Islands of Abandonment ,…
From Twitter --> From Twitter During the rise of the Nazi party, one corner of the German populace was indoctrinated in a form of irrational fear that dictates that the only solution to the demands of the common people is to create a greater, authoritarian fear in response and sell it as the will and action of the just people against a faceless, selfish Jewish enemy. This begat grabs for positions…
A good father figure (heteronormatively speaking)… Doesn’t use his mother, sister, wife, girlfriend, or daughter as shields for his sexist fodder Fucking shows up early and stays late Listens and waits to speak Normalizes women’s reproductive health Doesn’t call his kid a quitter; gives them support for trying something new; helps them process why they quit, what they learned Breaks down household…
A boarded up store front in Minneapolis, a common site during the uprisings. I watched my city burn this week. I watched four people sworn to protect it kill an unarmed black man while in custody. I watched white supremacists with and without a badge come out of the woodwork to accelerate the destruction of immigrant and black communities. I watched a city otherwise plagued by segregation and…
Despite the language barrier, we found a lovely conversation. A woman from Japan sat next to me on the plane from Prague to Amsterdam. Her English was very broken, and who am I to judge? I know nothing of Japanese. She told me she was in Czechia visiting a friend who had moved there some 20 years ago. When she asked where I was from, I surprised her. She thought I was European. I thanked her,…
The conservatory at Como Zoo in St. Paul, Minnesota. That last decade was a wild ride, wasn’t it? Remember that time the media gave Obama shit for wearing a tan suit? Or that moment when that couple you’ve been close friends with made the leap into parenthood and the happiness you felt for them? That night you stayed up longer than you should to help someone mend their broken heart? Or all those…
The man from Rotterdam sitting at the window seat on the plane with a view of the Netherland countryside below. The man from Rotterdam was baffled when the Jewish man in the seat in front of us asked me if I was Republican or Democrat on our flight to Amsterdam. Politics in Holland are plainly liberal, Rotterman stated, and such a question could not exist. The people of his country form coalitions…
As a designer, few things pain me more than being told to “think blue sky” or “think big.” I wasn’t hired to be told how to think. I was hired because I proved I know how to think. I’m here to solve problems. Give me the problem, tell me how to reproduce it, show me the data you have to back it, and tell me your ideas to get it solved. Your deadlines, restrictions, limitations, and exceptions are…
§ Part 1 - Introduction & Discontent I’m what the industry calls a “junior.” We’re those people that fall into that weird 1- and 3-year career experience range. We’re the ones that are most likely kneeling at a hiring manager’s ankles at networking events and groveling for just a few seconds of their time. It’s no secret that the industry is severely lacking people power. There are tens of…
After a lifetime obsession with design and any number of detours, I’ve finally jumped over to the world of UX, and it’s very good to be here. § About Me I’m Joshua Bartz: a lifelong learner and tinkerer. I love thinking in systems-level complexity and translating to layman terms for the rest of the world. I’ve been a press operator for a printing company, a full-service computer technician, and a…
We lost the headphone jack on iPhones and all but USB-C and a headphone jack on Mac laptops. Feature parity between iOS and macOS is drifting apart (see: Messages) and even their own devices can no longer plug in to one another without purchase of a dongle or separate cable. Apple may find itself in a rut this year on interoperability, but until first- and third-party USB-C devices and software…