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.

Two weeks in Japan. I could write a lot about it, but I'll just share the three places that stuck with me the most.

The Tottori Sand Dunes were unlike anything I expected. You drive through green, ordinary Japanese countryside and then suddenly there's an actual desert. Wind shapes, shadows, silence. The scale of it catches you completely off guard. Kurashiki's old town in the Bikan district is the opposite, deeply human in scale, canals lined with white-walled merchant houses from the Edo period that somehow feel completely alive and not at all like a museum. And then Naoshima Island, which is its own thing entirely. Art installations embedded into the landscape, the Chichu Art Museum half-buried underground, local houses turned into permanent works. If you ever get the chance to go to any of these three, go.

This piece by Ky has been sitting with me since I read it back last week. A design engineer writing honestly about quitting their tech job, burning out not just from the pace but from what the industry is becoming. The way AI integration is hollowing out the meaning of the work, the way progressive ideals that drew a lot of us into tech in the first place have quietly been abandoned. I don't agree with all of it but I felt a lot of it. Do I belong in tech anymore?. Worth reading slowly.

Spotify DJ finally launched in Germany last month and it's genuinely good. It's been available in English-speaking markets for a few years, but now there's a German version with its own persona, DJ Ben, and it speaks your language, knows your listening history, and can actually take requests. I've been using it during work sessions this week and it keeps nailing the vibe. If you're on Spotify Premium in Germany, Austria or Switzerland and haven't tried it yet, just open the app and search for DJ.

---

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