Essays and media reviews by Justin Duke
Jesse wrote this interesting article on technical debt, which resonated with me spiritually but not directionally -- which is a very weird way to say that I agree with some parts and disagree with others (so you should read this not as a critique of the post but an exploration from my point of view). The title of this essay is "negative-interest tech debt", which gives you a sense of where Jesse…
It is rare that I review a book before I finish it. Sometimes I do this with bad books that I have not completed — but that is what the Goodreads user base calls DNFing it, explicitly saying that I am not going to finish, and therefore am capital-D done with it. I do it every so often with video games, too, where even if my interest in completing the thing end-to-end is waning, I still want to…
Letterboxd has an ingenious concept baked into its rating system. You can rate a film on a scale of zero to four stars, and you can also adorn a film with a heart. These two things are completely separate systems. The films you love and the films you thought were great are by default a decoupled set.
Earlier this year I mentioned that Slay the Spire 2 had reached the status of needing to be deleted from my computer, on the grounds that it was proving too big of a distraction. More recently, a second game has reached that same ignoble height — except it's not even a full game. It's a demo. It is Guildrun.
Eighteen months ago, I wrote in review of Being John Malkovich:
Two friends, upon learning that I wanted to get into Clarice Lispector, advised me not to start with Near to the Wild Heart. Having now finished the book, I think I understand why.
Two small tooling changes that have been really nice for us at Buttondown:
Last year, I watched The War Room, the documentary following Bill Clinton's first campaign — a film I am remiss for having never written about, because it was captivating, satisfying, and illuminating. And whether for good reasons or bad, it punctured most of my belief that the political moment we currently find ourselves in is novel in any grand sense. (See also Days of Rage, which covered the…
Perhaps the single most consequential essay I've read is Will Larson's Work on what matters. This is ostensibly advice targeted towards staff engineers, but the content generalizes across disciplines. One of the failure modes he talks about is snacking:
Nick pointed me towards Marcin who pointed me towards immich's list of cursed knowledge the other day, and it has already become a running joke in the Slack.
More by luck than by fate, most of the great protagonists of the last forty years of television have escaped forever being associated with the character they played. Jon Hamm's love of comedy means that, in a bizarre way, I think of him more as a guest on Comedy Bang Bang than as Don Draper — despite Mad Men being my favorite show of all time. Similarly, Bryan Cranston has such a well-enmeshed…
No matter what, you're going to have a great time watching this movie. It is funny and audacious and handcrafted, which is a quality that feels increasingly absent from the modern cinematic landscape. It is hard to get an honest-to-God comedy released these days. It is even harder to get one of this kind that is as bizarre and metatextual and devoid of any real box office draw, except its own…
As I've covered somewhat extensively in prior writing (see A month of OpEx quick wins and Self-hosting our GitHub Action runners), this year has been marked by a careful and deliberate shrinking of our stack, button down, with the goals of, in order, one, reduce long-term maintenance burden. Two, reduce operational expenses. Almost without us really meaning to, this has materialized indirectly as…
I've received a number of questions as to how the media library part of this blog works, and I figure it's worth a bit of time to explain — even though there frankly is not that much to explain.
When I try to describe this film, I keep fleeing from the word strange toward poetic — because there isn't much strange about it. If you accept its conceit at face value, everything that follows is fairly naturalistic and straightforward, especially given what else I've seen from Wenders. And the conceit is simple enough: angels, in a spiritual but perhaps not biblical sense, are all around us,…
I think this might be the first Hitchcock that just didn't really work for me. The premise feels unlike so much of his output: dated and strained.
This week, after a little under two years of having adopted the practice, Buttondown has minted its 200th decision log. This is a practice very similar to RFCs or ADRs, but I prefer the term decision because it's both A, used for a variety of non-engineering purposes, and B, sounds a little less lame. The practice itself is extremely simple and there is no catch. It goes something like the…
June, like any month in which I neither write very much nor read very much, feels already cryptographic in retrospect.
I was young. I wanted something very badly and I was afraid that if I took my eye off it, I wouldn’t have it. And I was right. There was no other way to do it. And it meant choosing it over you. But it was always meant to be temporary.Just until I got what I wanted...But then I had to keep it.
I have had exactly two conversations this week about denormalization, which is a sign that it is time to write a blog post. If you already know what denormalization is, you will likely find this blog post uninteresting. That is okay! It is meant more to be an artifact that I can point to when people who haven't been burnt by the fires of sad databases (or, perhaps, sad ETL pipelines) ask what I'm…
I envy you. You have your whole life ahead of you and you know exactly what you want to do. But forget the rat puke; write something beautiful.
The hardest part of gardening is not correctly timing the seedling transfer, or deciding when a plant is a goner versus when it just needs one more week. The hardest part of gardening, at least for me, is resisting the urge to make cheap and facile metaphors.
One interesting thing about films, relative to — say — writing within video games, is the demarcation of amateurishness. (A description I don't mean to carry any moral valence.) The indie revival in games owes much, much of itself to the fact that games are a medium where polish and craftsmanship and production value can actively work against the core gameplay loop. Books, on the other hand, have…
Update, July 2026: Bill Mill kindly pointed out that the Cavs' head coach is Kenny Atkinson, not JB Bickerstaff — who coached Cleveland until 2024 but as of this writing coaches the Pistons. My bad and thanks, Bill.
In what is certainly the least consequential update in this blog's history: I have boomeranged back from Apple Podcasts to Overcast.
There are two mental models about work and fatigue which, like my brief dalliance with Roshe Runs, I have loved and outgrown:
A couple of folks have written in over the past month asking how my experiments in self-hosting GitHub Actions runners have held up. And three months seems like a reasonable amount of time to post a follow-up.
This was a film that I found, in some order, slight, confounding, sweet, clever, and — above all of these things — reaching but not yet grasping.
I started this book on the recommendation of Scholar's Stage, who I would describe as one of the few deeply interesting and serious conservative historians on X, the Everything App — someone whose recommendations and commentary I find uniformly interesting. His was a rapturous recommendation, albeit one prefaced with a caveat: that the book is deeply liberal, to the point of some small amount of…
Inspired by a recent Simon Willison post, I just ran ccusage on my laptop and learned that over the past thirty days, on my sole subscription of $200 a month for Claude, I have consumed $2,422.13 worth of tokens. 1All of this elides the fact that ccusage anchors onto something that is itself slightly lossy: we have to take as given the assumption that the unit cost of tokens through metered…
It was fifteen minutes into The In-Laws that I suspected an uncanny feeling of déjà vu, and thirty minutes in that I confirmed my suspicions with an unlocked memory of having watched it somewhere between ten and fifteen years ago, in a context I cannot recall beyond mild insobriety. With this revelation, the remainder of the plot — already formulaic and predictable — snapped into place, and I was…
Murder by Death is a film that is easy to laugh at and easy to like. It is something like Clue meets Knives Out — a broad farce, lovingly rendered, that gathers the biggest detectives of the day (most of whom have survived and or thrived in the public consciousness all of these years) to solve the purportedly unsolvable murder of and/or by Truman Capote.
As I often do after finishing a movie I loved, I have spent the past few days burning spare compute (as they say) turning Network over in my head and situating it within the other works that I love. Network's influence is vast. But my personal canon implicates one writer in particular, above the rest: Aaron Sorkin.
It is perhaps embarrassing to admit that I had never seen Network, and this year — its fiftieth anniversary — felt as good a time as any, especially considering how intimately familiar I already was with the film's plot, its two capstone monologues, and its general influence on culture and, if not journalism itself, then the lens through which we view journalism. And now, having watched it and…
I have found much peace this year going offline to shelter myself from the whiplash of LLM companies jockeying for mindshare by cosplaying as DevRel. Every now and then something gets through the filter bubble — usually because it concerns Markdown, a topic near and dear to my heart and one increasingly in vogue in the age of LLMs as a message bus.
One of the things I miss most about working in an office is osmosis: the ability to absorb information from coworkers purely by peering over their shoulder for five minutes and seeing how they did their work. This is how I learned about using a debugger. About NeoVim. About a dozen other small ergonomic tricks that I've since internalized to the point I can't remember a time without them.
Buttondown no longer runs Redis!
James Shore has a post I found myself nodding along to until the very last step, where he loses me. The thesis is clean:
At its core, Sweet Smell of Success is about two men. At the beginning of the film, you think — while similar — one is decent, just desperate, and the other is beyond saving. By the end, you understand that both men are evil; the only thing separating them is the amount of power they wield.
Buttondown has grown a lot in 2026; some of that growth is uncomfortable. I've talked to enough people about this in real life that it felt worth writing some of it down while it's fresh — if for no other reason than to revisit in a few years' time.
Nick sent me a great post from one of the engineers at Goodenough, the fine folks behind Jelly, on the topic of self-updating screenshots. It is near and dear to my heart: their approach, which uses Puppeteer to programmatically generate screenshots on every deploy, is spiritually adjacent to my own galaxy-brained approach of just using iframes pointed at a live demo site to achieve the same end.…
I had hoped and expected that the chaos which had marked the start of the year — floors, termites, sickness, fires, ACL surgery — was largely behind us, and that I would be freed to find some sort of rhythm or backbeat with which to tether a new normalcy. And of course, this has not been the case, though for more pleasant reasons than previously: three semi-impromptu trips (all good); lots of…
What's Up, Doc? is, I guess, just a perfect film.
I have played Slay the Spire 2 for around thirty hours. I am, after writing this review, uninstalling it from my laptop and praying my resolve is strong enough to keep it that way: a testament, to put it mildly, to how perfectly calibrated this game is and how effortlessly it enables my least productive tendencies.
A baby holds your hands, and then suddenly, there's this huge man lifting you off the ground, and then he's gone. Where's that son?
One way to approach writing about Masters of Doom is to talk about its outsized influence. Just off the top of my head: two pretty meaningful pieces of art about technology — BlackBerry and Halt and Catch Fire — both crib heavily from its narrative and its depictions of the early-90s technology zeitgeist. On the private-sector side, the founders of Reddit and Oculus both cite it as a core text…
If you have ever chatted with me in real life, you know that my writing style here closely reflects my speaking manner. My writing, just like my speaking, is labyrinthine and circuitous. Like a bad DFW knockoff, I manage to digress from my digressions. Sometimes it takes me minutes at a time to find my way back to what I was trying to say.
If you men only knew.
What he's offering is a critique of a critique. But in its place, he identifies a different kind of crisis. Not the crisis of attention, but the crisis of interest. See, to talk about attention is its own kind of distraction. Kids pay attention to things that interest them. The real question is what interests them? Or us? Are we losing interest in things that matter? Words on a page, for instance.…
I'm not sure why, but this movie was not at all what I thought it was going to be. I don't just mean in terms of quality — though it certainly was better than I was assuming — but in terms of kind. In my head, this film was fairly generic crime fodder of the sort typical in the late nineties (perhaps it's the generic name that threw me off base). Instead, it was — and I truly don't mean this as…