Hey there 👋
Welcome to this installment of Pixel Perfect Picks. Here I'm sharing something that I heard, read, and saw. You can subscribe to this newsletter here. I'm additionally publishing a more extended essay about software development, design, and freelancing every month.
This week I'm writing from Varna, Bulgaria, where I'm spending the week at a company offsite. Still feels a little surreal to be working from the Black Sea coast, but here we are.
Welcome to this installment of Pixel Perfect Picks. Here I'm sharing something that I heard, read, and saw. You can subscribe to this newsletter here. I'm additionally publishing a more extended essay about software development, design, and freelancing every month.
This week I'm writing from Varna, Bulgaria, where I'm spending the week at a company offsite. Still feels a little surreal to be working from the Black Sea coast, but here we are.
Saw Something
Karl Koch wrote something this week that I've been thinking about ever since. The argument is that designers and engineers who can build risk falling in love with their implementations and then retroactively justifying them, instead of building toward a predetermined reason. His solution is write-first design: commit your reasoning and decision to writing before a single pixel gets moved or a line of code gets written. It keeps the argument honest and testable while changes are still cheap. Write-first design. Short, clear, and genuinely useful.
Read Something
Stanford published their CS229 machine learning lecture on how LLMs actually get trained and I've been working through it this week. Yann Dubois walks through all the components that go into building something like Claude or ChatGPT: architecture, training loss, data curation, evaluation benchmarks, and the systems layer. It's dense but incredibly well explained, and it's the best overview I've come across for actually understanding what's happening under the hood rather than just taking it on faith. Watch it on YouTube. Complex but very, very interesting.
Heard Something
Lighter one to close out. James Hoffmann started a new series on the AeroPress and the first episode is exactly what you'd expect from him: meticulous, warm, and somehow deeply entertaining for what is essentially a video about a plastic coffee brewer. The history, the inventor Alan Adler, why it became a global phenomenon. Episode one is right here. If you're even remotely into coffee it'll pull you in immediately.
Keep Creating Awesome Stuff ✌️
If you like these and think someone else might too, please forward it on. They can subscribe to this newsletter right at the top at https://world.hey.com/mrvn. Thank you.
-Marvin