Chase McCoy explores, builds, & writes about the web
Although I’m generally allergic to dependencies as a programmer, I occasionally stumble upon a package that 1) does a thing I really wouldn’t want to implement myself, and 2) is obviously well crafted and likely to be reliable and well maintained. Having great tools in your back pocket, waiting to be leveraged when needed, is a superpower. So here’s one such tool: @pierre/diffs , available at…
Sunday Robotics designed and developed their new robot, Memo, and the platform for training it in stealth over the past two years. No hype events, no prototypes being operated remotely by humans, no promises to change the world. Sunday seems happy to let the result of the work stand for itself: the company’s first tweet was posted just this month! In an age of endless and often fraud-adjacent…
Something I’m noticing about AI, or at least this moment of AI agents and tools for building software, is the extreme amount of fiddling they invite. Fiddling here includes things like trying new models and tools, tweaking prompts, leveraging MCP servers vs. code tools, browsing plugins, installing skills, configuring hooks, setting up subagents, and the list goes on. The specific knobs you can…
I’ve felt compelled to write something about what it’s like living in Chicago during the moment we find ourselves in now, but luckily Dan Sinker wrote a piece that I can simply link to and quote here : What I need you to understand is that nobody is letting them go quietly. The Feds’ every movement is announced by a chorus of whistles, by a parade of cars honking in their wake, neighbors rushing…
The more I use Claude Code, the more I find it useful and interesting for tasks beyond the one for which it is named. Simon Willison agrees : Claude Code is, with hindsight, poorly named. It’s not purely a coding tool: it’s a tool for general computer automation. Anything you can achieve by typing commands into a computer is something that can now be automated by Claude Code. It’s best described…
An irony of the personal computing revolution is that, while everyone has a supercomputer in their pocket, a majority of our actual computing has moved to machines in the cloud that we neither own or control. This surely has some benefits: apps and data are available anywhere and instantly in sync across devices, users are less likely to lose any of their data if their physical device is lost or…
All designers have an origin story, and mine is rooted in a childhood obsession with fictional and futuristic interfaces. I watched science fiction not for the story or characters, but for a glimpse at what a computer could be. One of my favorites was Star Trek and the LCARS (Library Computer Access/Retrieval System) interface for the ship’s computers. Here is an interface that breaks free from…
Someone found the real Spotify accounts of famous politicians, journalists, and media/tech figures and scraped their listening data for more than a year. They’ve published some of the data online as the Panama Playlists . The Panama Papers revealed hidden bank accounts. This reveals hidden tastes. Scroll in wonder and/or horror! File this one away as another excellent example of culture…
We all have our own antilibrary , the books we buy with the best intentions of reading but never quite get around to. For architects, a similar concept might be the sketches and plans that never leave the drawing board: antibuildings? I’d venture to say there’s likely as much to learn in studying the antibuildings of great architects as there is in studying those works that have been fully…
Mary Oliver once said that “attention is the beginning of devotion.” I want to highlight a few examples of this in practice that have recently crossed my desk. First: the YouTube channel of Baumgartner Restoration , of which I’ve been recently obsessed. The videos feature the proprietor, Julian Baumgartner, narrating the painstaking process of restoring and conserving fine works of art. There is…
It’s not every day that you get to experience a whole new color, and yet: scientists recently viewed an entirely new color by firing lasers to manipulate individual cone cells. No, really! Most of us don’t have precise eye-lasers at home, but luckily there’s a workaround to approximate the effect. A biological cheat code, if you will. This blog post over at dynomight.net features an animation you…
Here’s something that checks all kinds of boxes for me: Lori Emerson has a gorgeous new book coming soon (April) called Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook, which you can preorder now from publisher Mexican Summer . Other Networks is writer and researcher Lori Emerson’s speculative index of communications networks that existed before or outside of the internet: digital as well as…
I really enjoyed this writeup from Matt Webb about extending AIs using Anthropic’s proposed Model Context Protocol . In its own words, MCP is “an open protocol that standardizes how applications provide context to LLMs”. Back in 2023 I wrote a bit about an early attempt at something similar by OpenAI and was pretty excited about the potential. MCP takes things to another level by making it an open…
Contrary to oft-repeated wisdom, the internet isn’t written in ink. Physical ink on paper is often a far better method for carrying data forward into the future. Manuscripts that are hundreds and even thousands of years old are still with us, and still being discovered every day. Will the same be true of our own data a hundred years from now? Physical collections benefit from their form: by taking…
One of my favorite albums from last year was Mk.gee’s Two Star and the Dream Police , so I was delighted to recently discover this collaboration between Mk.gee and another artist I like called Dijon. If the electricity of their creative partnership in this video doesn’t get you excited, I don’t know what will.
Happy New Year! I’ve returned from holiday travels and am settling back into work for 2025. Here are three, quick, bookish recommendations from links that have crossed my desk recently. First, a newsletter: Katie Clapham’s Receipt from the Bookshop is a new favorite of mine. Katie runs an independent bookshop in Lancashire, and every Friday when she opens the shop she also starts a new draft of…
Some personal news: after four years of working on design systems at Stripe , I’m leaving to join Era as a design engineer. This change is going to be pretty big for me in a few ways. I’ll be going from a large, enterprise company to a tiny, consumer startup. It will also be the first time in ~9 years that I won’t be focusing on design systems. Why the change? One of the reasons is a desire to…
I really enjoyed Kyle Chayka’s latest piece for The New Yorker about using the Process Zero feature of the Halide camera app for iPhone, which forgoes the AI-powered image processing that iOS applies by default. My phone camera roll looks different now. There are fewer repeats or slight variations on the same image, taken in a burst. The compositions are less static or symmetrical, and the colors…
A good day on the web is one where you stumble across a website that makes you go “woah??” and then “huh…?” followed by a wide grin. I have one of those websites to show you! Digital Divinity is a really neat project documenting the ways in which new technologies are being incorporated into religious practices. Each entry is accompanied by a lovely illustration from an artist named Glenn Harvey .…
Riley Walz hid a solar powered Android phone in the Mission and set it to run Shazam all day, every day. The result is Bop Spotter , a site listing all of the songs that have been detected. This is culture surveillance. No one notices, no one consents. But it’s not about catching criminals. It’s about catching vibes. A constant feed of what’s popping off in real-time. Culture Surveillance is a…
Throughout my career as a designer, I’ve experienced a recurring struggle with the concept of process. I used to look at process as something sacred: a holy calculus through which I could find the right answer to a problem every time. All I needed to do was remember the steps and apply them in just the right way. Wash, rinse, repeat. Maybe this idea stems from my background in programming, or…
I stumbled upon a great site which acts as an explainer for vanilla web development techniques called, well, Plain Vanilla . When I was starting out as a developer I had a hard time learning the basics of the web platform because so many resources and examples used a framework. It was mostly jQuery at the time, and today I’d assume React and Tailwind are the most common starting points for new…
I’m fascinated by the way that CSS, as it becomes more powerful, can be used as a visual language for representing the physical world . Combined with the longevity of the web, which strives to never break backwards compatibility, it’s a powerful tool for sending information into the future. Here’s another example I stumbled on: Orbit is a CSS framework for radial constructs . It provides an easy…
Programming note: the domain for this website has changed! chasem.co is out, and chsmc.org is in. All existing links and feeds should redirect automatically, because good URIs don’t change , but please let me know if you see otherwise. Why the switch? A few things: Pronouncing my email address (@chasem.co) always resulted in spelling it out anyway, and “do you mean .com?” was a frequent response.…
I recently showed a few friends around Chicago, and as we passed by the Art Institute and the two lions guarding the entrance, I wondered if they had names like the lion sculptures outside the New York Public Library. Those lions are named Patience and Fortitude , and were modeled by Edward Clark Potter in time for the library’s dedication in 1911. New York’s lions have had several nicknames…
Figma announced a host of new AI-powered features this week at their annual conference, and they have been received by designers with both cheer and dismay. Tools like the ones that were announced are showing up across the industry, but as the most popular tool for modern product design, Figma will make them commonplace, and we’ll soon be taking them for granted just like any other advancement in…
Here’s a thing I never would have imagined possible: an LLM embedded into a font . Many applications (including Chrome and Firefox) use a font rendering engine called HarfBuzz, and HarfBuzz recently added support for running arbitrary WebAssemply code in order to “shape” the pixels that are drawn onscreen when rendering a font. You can see the font, llama.ttf, in action in this video . Over the…
One of my favorite forms of online content is when someone finds an interesting, obscure story from the past and manages to extract a lesson that’s widely applicable today. I like to think of it as something like fan fiction: we, as individuals, retcon and re-tell stories from the past to help us make sense of the present. Elan Ullendorff published a great example of this recently in a piece…
I’ve remarked before on my gratefulness for CSS as the ubiquitous and expressive visual language of our times, a sort of design Esperanto (that is actually widely spoken). One would struggle to find a more perfect example of this than Scribe , by Stephen Band . Scribe is a custom element ( <scribe-music> ) which renders responsive music notation in HTML and CSS grid. Here’s an example,…
There are two new features coming to CSS that will make it much easier to further avoid JavaScript when implementing animations: Animating to and from display: none; for the sake of enter/exit animations. Animating to and from the intrinsic size of an element (such as height: auto; ). Traditionally, animating something into or out of the screen (as opposed to just hiding it visually) required…
I really appreciated this write up from Jeremy Keith about his personal approach and best practices for HTML web components . Judging by the discourse, web components seem to be gaining in popularity lately, and I’m very here for it. Trying to build on the web using a component model was what led me (and others I’m sure) into the arms of React many years ago. While I’m grateful for that journey,…
Many of my online acquaintances know that I live in Chicago, but I suspect they might not know that I’m from a small university town in Mississippi called Starkville. Starkville is home to Mississippi State University, where I attended college and studied Computer Science. In 2017 I graduated and moved to Chicago to start my career. At the time I was excited to escape the place where I spent so…
Hearty congrats to Robin Rendle who has turned his wonderful CSS-focused newsletter into a good, old fashioned blog. The Cascade is beautiful, and is already full of great content for CSS nerds like me. The site is, generously, free to read, but member supported for $10/year. Subscribing, for me, was an absolute no brainer. I liked this bit from an issue of Robin’s personal newsletter that he sent…
Several months ago, in an issue of Spencer Chang’s newsletter , I discovered the 6 hour video review of a game called Boku no Natsuyasumi by Tim Rogers (known as Action Button). To call this a review is surely stretching the limits of the word’s meaning as we know it. Boku no Natsuyasumi, henceforth shortened as Bokunatsu, is a game for the original PlayStation released 24 years ago in Japan. And…
Here’s something unexpected: Keanu Reeves and China Miéville (one of my favorite science fiction authors) are writing a book together that’s dropping in July. The Book of Elsewhere is described as a “genre-bending epic of ancient powers, modern war, and an outcast who cannot die.” Sign me up. Speaking of books being released this year, Robin Sloan’s new novel Moonbound will land in June. Preorder…
A small programming note—I’ve updated my homepage to include highlights from articles and books I’ve read in addition to blog posts. The highlights are synced from my Readwise account. If you haven’t used Readwise Reader , I highly recommend it. It’s my modern replacement for Instapaper, and has a wonderful browser extension which allows for in-place highlighting of passages (including comments!)…
Paul has always been my favorite Beatle. I was in junior high school when I got hooked—during that time there’s a good chance that if you found me listening to music on my iPod nano, it was The Beatles. Perhaps it was Paul’s youthfulness and humor that made him approachable to me at that age in a way that John wasn’t. Paul was someone you might have known in real life, but John and George seemed…
For how much software has evolved and matured I find it strange how many tasks remain unaddressed by niche, purpose-built software. I’m always excited to see how novel ideas can come about from focusing in on a narrow domain. Ink and Switch’s latest research prototype Embark focuses on one specific task: making travel plans. Embark uses a humble text-based document as its interface, which it then…
Wherever I can I prefer to work in the browser vs. tools like Figma. As the web platform grows (we seem to be in a sort of golden age at the moment) it becomes easier and easier to do my job with only the raw materials of the web. Recently I’ve been working on a project at the day job that requires the use of something akin to layout grids in Figma . I was curious how difficult it would be to…
Autumn is my favorite time of the year. The trees outside my apartment here in Oak Park are shining gold, and the air is starting to feel crisp and cold. Sweater weather, if you will. Hashimoto Okiie, Autumn at Himeji Castle, 1949 Besides the weather and foliage, the best part of the season may just be its rituals. One of my favorites is an annual rewatching of Over the Garden Wall, which is the…
We’re seeing a surge of platforms self-sabotaging and choosing to suddenly restrict access to their content . These are all blatant attempts to trap users by digging a moat around the communities that they’ve created. I can think of 3 obvious reasons why this might all be happening now as opposed to any time over the past decade: The content on social media platforms is valuable for AI training,…
Humane (the mysterious company founded by ex-Apple executives) has finally revealed the name of the product they’re hoping to ship this year: the Humane Ai Pin . I’m as skeptical as the next person about AI and wearables and really anything with as much hypebeast marketing as this product has received. But if I put my skepticism aside for a moment I’m able to appreciate this for what it is—a group…
In the new book Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in His Own Words , Steve talks about his love for books and also their shortcomings: The problem was, you can’t ask Aristotle a question. And I think, as we look towards the next fifty to one hundred years, if we really can come up with these machines that can capture an underlying spirit, or an underlying set of principles, or an underlying way…
It’s hard to keep up with the progress of AI. It seems as though every week there’s a new breakthrough or advancement that seemingly changes the game. Each step forward brings both a sense of wonder and a feeling of dread. This past week, OpenAI introduced ChatGPT plugins which “help ChatGPT access up-to-date information, run computations, or use third-party services.” Though not a perfect…
I’m finally getting around to playing Ghost of Tsushima which is impressive all around. But the thing that has impressed me most is… wind?? The game rejects the normal interface of a minimap to guide players, and instead uses the wind and the environment to show the way forward. When The Guiding Wind blows in Tsushima, the entire game world responds. The trees bend over, pointing you onward. The…
Science fiction is one of my favorite genres because of its power to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange. Kim Stanley Robinson wrote an anti-dystopian essay in which he discusses how science fiction works : For a while now I’ve been saying that science fiction works by a kind of double action, like the glasses people wear when watching 3D movies. One lens of science fiction’s…
I have a lot of nostalgia for the era of blogging that I grew up with during the first decade or so of the 2000s. Of course there was a ton of great content about technology and internet culture, but more importantly to me it was a time of great commentary and experimentation on the form of blogging and publishing. As social media and smartphones were weaving their ways into our lives, there was a…
The recent fad of the metaverse is all about digitizing the physical world and moving our shared experiences (even more so) onto the internet. I wonder what an opposite approach might look like—one where, instead of making the physical digital, we instead attempt to bring the online world into our physical spaces (and no, I don’t remotely mean AR or VR). The first thing that comes to mind for me…
I remember the first time I saw a Mac in person. I was in middle school, but on the campus of the nearby college because my dad had a gig as a stand-in drummer for a local band. While hanging out backstage—something I often had the privilege of doing from a young age as the son of a drummer—I saw a girl, sitting on the ground, typing away on a brand new MacBook Air. The Air had just been…
Since I was a kid the space program has been an object of my fascination, and even as an adult I’ve been captured by the heroics of NASA and other organizations launching probes and telescopes into the far reaches of space. But something has never sat quite right with me about the recently renewed interest in human space travel, especially from CEOs of private companies like Musk and Bezos. I…