iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Justin Duke @jmduke.com · 26/09/2026

the buttondown team is meeting this week to talk about 2027! what are the things that, if we do them, you would go "oh FINALLY_"?

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Justin Duke @jmduke.com · 05/09/2026

www.jmduke.com/posts/coffee...

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Justin Duke @jmduke.com · 05/09/2026

when they're right they're right bsky.app/profile/tang...

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Justin Duke @jmduke.com · 22/08/2026

Optimist: The cup is half full Pessimist: The cup is half empty Caro: His name was Emmett Doyle, and he was not a man who astonished easily, and he was not a man whose opinion anyone had ever requested. He had poured for aldermen and for the men who owned aldermen. He had poured, in 1934, for a go

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Justin Duke @jmduke.com · 20/08/2026

forgot to mention but another underrated part of WHAS is david hyde pierce showing up like spiderman and absolutely crushing the vibe www.jmduke.com/posts/wet-ho...

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Justin Duke @jmduke.com · 20/08/2026

www.jmduke.com/posts/a-mast... a film I will forever remember as the one that pushed me to listen to an episode of blank check

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Justin Duke @jmduke.com · 09/08/2026

www.jmduke.com/posts/second...

Secondhand Time is an oral history of the regions comprising the former USSR, compiled almost entirely from firsthand narrative: actual people recounting their past. It is sprawling and nonlinear. There are obvious messages the author is trying to communicate — but unless I am in for a rude awakening, there is going to be no denouement that deeply recontextualizes or reshapes everything that came before.

You hear countless stories, repetitive and rhapsodic, from every possible walk of life, though almost all of these walks involve the scars and bruises left by war and revolution. The only unifying thread is sadness and bitterness — not nostalgia, though certainly some of these stories contain nostalgia, so much as the sense of a country weeping for all the pain it has gone through.

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Justin Duke @jmduke.com · 06/08/2026

buttondown.com/blog/what-i-...

Buttondown is written in Django for a boring but revealing reason: it's what I knew at the time. Back in 2018, I was working for a company whose stack was Django and Vue, and I had been hired as someone with extensive amounts of Django experience (meaning: I knew what South was, for you fellow old-timers.)

One of my longstanding philosophies has been to limit innovation tokens. I didn't want to spend time context-switching between frameworks as I went from my day job to my side project. Over the intervening eight years, I've found myself ruing my choice of Vue as a front-end framework — but I can honestly say that, even if it wasn't a meticulously reasoned and considered choice, I have not for one second regretted using Django.

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Justin Duke @jmduke.com · 05/08/2026

www.jmduke.com/posts/patch-...

For Guildrun, the 3 major groups of players are the Climbers, the Endless Mode players, and the Red Rift players. The Climbers are players who are in the process of climbing through the difficulties to unlock and complete all of Guildrun's content, and are currently our largest group of players by a decent margin. Everyone starts out as a Climber, and for many of these players the quest to discover everything the game has to offer is the game. The experience that players have during their climb through the difficulties is incredibly important to us, and the feedback from Climbers helps make the game better for all Climbers, present and future. Since the primary goal for most Climbers is to progress up the game's difficulties, it's easy to understand why nerfs can feel like an obstacle standing between them and their goals, and why buffs feel like a helping hand.

It does not require a lot of rhetorical justification to understand how this might apply to traditional software. Software tends to grow more complex and featureful over time, which rewards edge case users who have already onboarded at the expense of new users; conversely, redesigns or radical simplifications of an interface might be a net positive for new users without any muscle memory whatsoever, but are often experienced as a net negative to experienced users who log in to find that all of their cheese has been moved.

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Justin Duke @jmduke.com · 04/08/2026

people liked this one! now time to add it to my own site bsky.app/profile/butt...

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Justin Duke @jmduke.com · 02/08/2026

www.jmduke.com/posts/best-o...

I hesitate to succumb to instinct and laud both them and the middle-brow public that appreciated and rewarded the idea of intellectualism. The histrionic fondness with which we might remember their patrician accents could very well be said, thirty or forty years from now, of people discovering blogs and pining for the days when public intellectuals would so candidly and openly write on Wordpress or whatever. Additionally, I don't buy at face value the film's thesis that these debates were the birth of American punditry. In no small part because I think television itself was the birth of American punditry — an organism that simply required some time to incubate.

But these two guys are fascinating, and the debates are riveting, and this documentary gets to carry that respective sunlight. The film takes an unflinching look at who these people were and what drove them. How clearly you can see that these two men led twinned lives, to a certain extent: both ultimately failed ambitions, both incredibly intelligent, and — in what seems so deeply interesting, perhaps more so than the denoument of their careers after the debates — both horribly, horribly despondent toward the end of their lives.

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Justin Duke @jmduke.com · 02/08/2026

maledictology: www.jmduke.com/posts/cursed...

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Justin Duke @jmduke.com · 07/02/2026

Rope! www.jmduke.com/posts/Rope%2...

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Justin Duke @jmduke.com · 06/02/2026

If I haven't somehow messed up the XSLT, I have officially joined the cool kids club by styling my RSS: www.jmduke.com/feed.xml

jmduke.com

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Justin Duke @jmduke.com · 05/02/2026

i would encourage you to watch THE DOUBLE, a film whose quality is aggressively out of proportion with its reputation www.jmduke.com/posts/the-do...

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Justin Duke @jmduke.com · 04/02/2026

The Black Hawk War, or, How to Demolish an Entire Civilization and Still Feel Good About Yourself in the Morning, or, We Apologize for the Inconvenience but You're Going to Have to Leave Now, or, 'I Have Fought the Big Knives and Will Continue to Fight Them Until They Are Off Our Lands!'

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Justin Duke @jmduke.com · 02/02/2026

The thing about The Killer is that that it's a farce. www.jmduke.com/posts/the-ki...

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Justin Duke @jmduke.com · 31/01/2026

www.jmduke.com/posts/ocean-... on today's episode of i love films

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Justin Duke @jmduke.com · 28/01/2026

www.jmduke.com/posts/the-pi...

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Justin Duke @jmduke.com · 28/01/2026

new bio bsky.app/profile/book...

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Justin Duke @jmduke.com · 12/01/2026

www.jmduke.com/posts/levels...

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Justin Duke @jmduke.com · 29/12/2025

sitemaptorss: www.jmduke.com/posts/sitema...

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Justin Duke @jmduke.com · 27/12/2025

on the off chance that you are debugging the same thing I am: 1password's chrome extension now ships a version of Prism.js that conflicts with other syntax highlighters. Not Great! www.1password.community/discussions/...

1password.community

[BUG] Beta and Nightly extension degrade page's original functionallity | 1Password Community

I was looking https://shiki.style/guide/install , an NPM package which provides syntax highlighting and showing detail hovering on keywords. It is expected...

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Justin Duke @jmduke.com · 21/12/2025

Notes on SLEUTH (1972): www.jmduke.com/posts/sleuth...

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Justin Duke @jmduke.com · 21/12/2025

number of words written into our support tool (I am in last place amongst the team)

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Justin Duke @jmduke.com · 20/12/2025

a not-insignificant reason we invest in social media analytics/automations is because literally every single other tool we've tried is not particularly good for our use case bsky.app/profile/butt...

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Justin Duke @jmduke.com · 20/12/2025

Wrote about Paris, Texas. www.jmduke.com/posts/paris-...

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Justin Duke @jmduke.com · 18/12/2025

CONCLAVE (2024). www.jmduke.com/posts/concla...

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Justin Duke @jmduke.com · 18/12/2025

blogroll.org This site by Manuel Moreale is not just lovely in the abstract, it might be the _calmest_ and most pleasant design I've seen in quite some time.

blogroll.org

Ye Olde Blogroll - Because blogs are the soul of the web

You are viewing a humanly curated list fine personal & independent blogs and sites that are updated regularly. No algorithms ever!

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Justin Duke @jmduke.com · 17/12/2025

Playing around with my media section on the new personal site has been fun. Here's a variant (live right now but likely not for long) where its sorted by luminosity:

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Justin Duke @jmduke.com · 04/12/2025

the industry is abound with "don't roll your own X" and analytics in particular is one of the things I like reaching to as a counterexample. finally wrote about it! bsky.app/profile/butt...

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Justin Duke @jmduke.com · 03/12/2025

reviews are rolling in

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Justin Duke @jmduke.com · 01/12/2025

doing two things a little different for this end-of-year, buttondown wise. one is an airbnb-style buildout of all the stuff we shipped. the other is a "raise-the-garage-door"-style series of posts about next year: bsky.app/profile/jmdu...

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Justin Duke @jmduke.com · 25/11/2025

one of my goals this year has been to open source more of buttondown's internal sawdust. a little bit under the wire, but this is the first of a few end-of-year goodies bsky.app/profile/butt...

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Justin Duke @jmduke.com · 21/11/2025

the SEO spammers are evolving

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Justin Duke @jmduke.com · 17/11/2025

There are many very cogent arguments against LLMs, but I do think that some people end up arguing that all productivity-increasing technology is immoral because the benefits do not solely accrue to labor bsky.app/profile/tant...

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Justin Duke @jmduke.com · 16/11/2025

Really proud of how often people write in about this little affordance for showing CSS selectors in the preview pane. Built it for myself because I was getting annoyed whilst dogfooding (which is why you should dogfood constantly.)

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Justin Duke @jmduke.com · 15/11/2025

It took an embarrassing amount of dithering but I finally settled on a Starship format that I like.

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Justin Duke @jmduke.com · 13/11/2025

Zach Lowe doing his first and probably only live show in Minneapolis is both incredibly on brand and deeply powerful

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Justin Duke @jmduke.com · 13/11/2025

somehow this didn't make the cut but @kierongillen.bsky.social also was patient enough to put up with me asking questions about the difference between docx and odt on a support thread recently bsky.app/profile/butt...

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Justin Duke @jmduke.com · 07/11/2025

we have been deep in the skunkworks about this, so to speak, but a fun fact is that the above screenshots are a ten-line CSS theme applied atop our "real" new theme, which I've taken to call "Operation CSS Zen Garden" bsky.app/profile/did:...

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Justin Duke @jmduke.com · 01/11/2025

huge discovery for "everything should be gofmt" boosters like myself bsky.app/profile/davi...

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