The Night Shift · by subject
Departments
The journal, sorted the way a magazine sorts itself — into sections. 15 running departments; pick a subject and read down the column.
- 01 24 essays
Engineering
How the software is really made: the decisions, the trade-offs, the details.
- 02 9 essays
Thyseus
Notes from building Thyseus — a live map stitched from public cameras and the idle compute in volunteers’ browser tabs.
- 03 8 essays
AI User Interviews
Notes from building AI User Interviews — moving the cap on user research off the calendar so a team can talk to a hundred users as easily as one.
- 04 7 essays
code-results
Notes from building code-results — tying every deploy to the business metrics that moved after it.
- 05 6 essays
DReader
Notes from building DReader — a clean, fast, phone-shaped mirror of the Drudge Report, built on a page that offers no feed and no API.
- 06 6 essays
Research
How we think about learning from users — what to ask, how many to ask, and how to tell when you have heard enough.
- 07 5 essays
Preflight
Notes from building Preflight — a native macOS utility that checks a PDF against exact submission limits and safely fits it under them, without ever touching the original.
- 08 3 essays
Design
Choices about how things look, read, and feel, and the reasons behind them.
- 09 3 essays
ganttchart.ai
Dispatches from building our flagship: an AI that turns a sentence into a project plan.
- 10 2 essays
Detection
Everything we've filed under Detection — notes from the night shift.
- 11 2 essays
Guides
Plain-English, step-by-step how-tos — the kind of thing we wish someone had handed our past selves.
- 12 2 essays
Philosophy
The convictions under the craft — why we build the way we build.
- 13 2 essays
Process
The working habits and small rituals behind the work.
- 14 2 essays
Studio
How a deliberately tiny, independent software studio actually runs, day to day.
- 15 1 essay
This site
Field notes from building trolls.dev itself — the site as its own little product.