The most unpopular popular websites

Screenshot of the Kagi Search home page, showing a very clean, simple page with essentially just the logo, the mascot Doggo, a text field, and a Search button. Very reminiscent of what Google Search's home page used to look like a long time ago.

Tonight I decided to give Kagi a try, after hearing John Gruber mention it a few times on Daring Fireball. I’ve used a mix of DuckDuckGo and Bing for over a decade now, and occasionally will still try Google in desperation. What I’ve noticed is a decade-long trend – accelerating in the last year or… Read more

Evil Pacman

Pie chart showing a black pie with a 20% wedge carved out in green on the right-hand side, overall resembling a colour-inverted Pacman

Google had (has?) a tongue-in-cheek achievement system built into the employee directory. Anyone can define a new achievement and award it to whomever, provided they can create (or pirate) a neat little icon for it. Lots of people have over the years – there must be thousands of distinct achievements possible, at this point. It’s… Read more

People vs Products

I’ve experienced an interesting arc over my twenty or so years (thus far) of software development. I started out as a one-person shop, doing my own things, selling shareware. I had no manager nor technical lead. I had to make all my own decisions, in all aspects, without guidance or assistance. Subsequently, during my four… Read more

The Myth of The Web

The recent kerfuffle with Microsoft Edge vs YouTube was particularly interesting since while I have no specific knowledge of that instance, I certainly do have some cultural insight from nearly eight years working inside the so-called Chocolate Factory – though not on any web stuff, to be clear, so my experience is in the broadest… Read more