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Designer, product manager, YouTuber and developer who has written about technology at Birchtree since 2010. He makes the Quick Reviews and Quick Notes apps and the A Better Computer YouTube channel.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Apps already built for iPad don't need to be redesigned from scratch to work well on larger foldable displays.

  Their words

  app developers don't have to start from square one and reconceptualize their apps for larger displays because a lot of them have already done that by supporting the iPad.

  birchtree.me

Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, and creator of Omarchy.

• Recommendstheir ownrcmnd.app

  Omarchy

  Their words

  Omarchy is going to be the best place to get every major AI harness and tool, configured with minimal effort

  x.com

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  Entrepreneurs benefit from setting ambitious goals, even though most people do not need grand ambitions at all.

  Their words

  And I will say I've actually changed my mind on that a little bit. I spent quite a lot of time speaking the other book that there are a lot of people who don't actually need those ambitions. And I also-- That's also true. We don't want 8 billion Elons running around the world. Would be rather crazy, I think. But I've come to realize that for entrepreneurs, it's healthy to have suitable chunky goals.

  youtube.com

Novelist and critic, author of The Body Scout and Metallic Realms; writes the newsletter Counter Craft on fiction craft and the publishing industry.

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  A cabin in literature typically serves as an escape from trouble or a place where new trouble is found.

  Their words

  The cabin is a classic literary setting. It's the getaway spot where characters can flee to escape their troubles or journey to in order to find new ones.

  Processing: How Josh Riedel Edited Thirty Cabinscountercraft.substack.com

Creator of the Keras deep-learning library and the ARC-AGI benchmark.

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  Deep Learning with Python

  Their words

  If you're 17 (or any age) and you want to learn to build LLMs from scratch, read chapters 15-16 of Deep Learning with Python

  x.com

Co-founder of Y Combinator and Viaweb; essayist at paulgraham.com.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The best thing a 17-year-old could do today is learn to build LLMs from scratch and train the most powerful ones they can get hardware for.

  LLMs

  Their words

  Someone asked what I'd do if I were 17. I'd learn how to build LLMs from scratch, and then train ones as powerful as I could with whatever hardware I could get access to.

  @paulg on Xx.com

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  Coding something from scratch is one of the best ways to truly understand how it works.

  Their words

  So this one will not be coding-related, but coding from scratch is actually a very, very useful technique because it really helps you understand how something is implemented.

  How Claude Watermarks AI-Generated Textmagazine.sebastianraschka.com

US science and technology adviser to the president, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; previously US chief technology officer and chief operating officer of Scale AI.

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  Legislating AI is riskier than an executive order, because the next administration can revoke a bad executive order and nobody can revoke a bad law.

  Their words

  The thing about executive orders, which is a little secret, is when administration changes, you can just revoke the executive order and and start from scratch again. Um when something is a law, you you can't do that.

  youtube.com

Programmer and teacher; writes on software, learning and the web, and makes the Coding Blocks video course.

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  The Hobbit

  Their words

  Having read this after LOTR, it was fun but underwhelming. Starting from scratch, it’s definitely better to start with The Hobbit.

  rakhim.org

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  Code

  Their words

  Woah, what a ride! An excellent explanation of how computers work, starting from scratch. Really, from scratch.

  rakhim.org

Organizational psychologist and professor at the Wharton School. Author of Give and Take, Originals, Think Again and Hidden Potential, host of the Re:Thinking podcast, and writer of the GRANTED newsletter.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Saying no and setting boundaries are acts of self-preservation, not selfishness or letting others down.

  Their words

  Saying no is not selfish; it's an act of self-preservation. Setting boundaries is not about letting others down-it's about standing up for yourself.

  The Truth About People Pleasingadamgrant.substack.com

Short-story writer and novelist; won the Booker Prize for Lincoln in the Bardo, and teaches craft weekly in Story Club.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The only style worth having is the one you cannot help; setting out to develop a personal style is the wrong goal.

  Their words

  And that there might come a moment, while reading a new, just-edited-for-the-thousandth-time draft, where that true self, or voice, pops out at you, suddenly revealed, as if someone else, not you, had done it.

  On the Perils of Self-Assessing...georgesaunders.substack.com

Polyglot who speaks twenty languages and co-founded LingQ; argues that comprehensible input, not study, is what does the work.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A beginner cannot learn from material made for native speakers: at the start, authentic media is noise.

  Their words

  If you are starting a language completely from scratch, authentic media is just noise. You’ll absorb very little. You need highly repetitive, simple input.

  blog.thelinguist.com

Founder of HumanLayer; wrote 12-Factor Agents, on how to build AI agents that hold up in production.

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  Research and planning documents are tactical execution artefacts to be thrown away and regenerated, because tokens are cheap and a doc that has drifted from the codebase costs you time.

  Their words

  I do the research I do the plan I do the implementation I throw the docs out and the next time I need research I just do it from scratch because tokens are cheap and my time is expensive

  Context engineering with Dex Horthyyoutube.com

General partner at Andreessen Horowitz from 2013 to 2018 and CTO of Coinbase from 2018 to 2019; co-founder of Counsyl and Earn.com. Wrote The Network State (2022), free in full at thenetworkstate.com, and founded the Network School.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  New laws often get enacted the way untested code is pushed to production: unread, poorly monitored, slow to show results, and hard to opt out of.

  Their words

  new laws are like code that is pushed live to production without even being read (let alone tested), often in the face of tremendous opposition, affecting millions of citizens, with minimal monitoring to ensure they’re producing the desired results, an extremely slow customer feedback cycle, and few ways to truly opt out.

  The Network Statethenetworkstate.com

Writes Pedestrian Observations on public transit and why infrastructure costs what it does; a pure mathematician by training, comparing how different countries build.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Transit investment should prioritize raising ridership on already well-used lines over creating minimal service where none exists.

  Their words

  it's more important to invest in trains that can get more riders than just the railfans; taking a line from 0% to 5% modal split is less important than taking it from 20% to 40%

  Prioritizing Rail Expansion in New Englandpedestrianobservations.com

Writer and author of All the Wrong Moves; his newsletter covers meditation, relationships and creativity, and he co-runs a perfume line.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The mind's planning and goal-setting function is only a small fraction of a person's overall intelligence.

  Their words

  The planning part of your mind, the one that generates ambitions and hypothetical situations, is a small part of your overall intelligence.

  Surrender as a non-stupid life strategysashachapin.substack.com

Music critic of The New Yorker since 1996 and author of The Rest Is Noise, Listen to This and Wagnerism.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Benjamin Britten is the benchmark among English-language composers for setting the work of intensely musical writers like Shakespeare and Keats to music.

  benchmarks

  Their words

  In the English-language arena, Britten sets the standard for handling writers of inborn musical power-the likes of Shakespeare, Donne, Blake, Keats, Hopkins.

  Liner notes to What Belongs to Youtherestisnoise.com

Writes jvns.ca, turning "hard and scary" topics — networking, debugging, Linux internals — into plain explanations and hand-drawn comics. Publishes Wizard Zines, illustrated programming zines. Software developer based in Montreal.

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  Tailwind is a good way to build a site you're happy with, even without strong CSS skills of your own.

  CSS

  Their words, before

  I ended up making this site with Tailwind CSS, and it helped me make a site I felt pretty happy with my minimal CSS skills and just 2 evenings of work!

  Their words now

  I’m a lot better at CSS than I was when I started using Tailwind Ultimately Tailwind is limiting: if you want to do Weird Stuff in your CSS, it’s not always possible with Tailwind. Those limits can be extremely useful (a lot of this post is about me reimplementing some of Tailwind’s limits!) but at this point I’d like to be able to pick and choose.

Writer and academic, author of The Cult of Smart and How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement; writes a daily newsletter on politics, education and culture.

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  Education cannot be done to a person: without at least a minimal act of will from the learner, no method, resource or reform works.

  Their words

  Education is not something that can be done to someone; it’s something that requires at least a minimal act of will from the learner, and no reform agenda can engineer that away.

  freddiedeboer.substack.com

Programmer and essayist who has worked at Amazon, Google, Grab and Sourcegraph. Best known for the long-form essays collected as Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants and Stevey's Blog Rants.

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  Big companies will lose about half of their engineers, because that is where everybody is setting the dial.

  Their words

  And so, what's happening is everybody on average is setting that dial to about 50% and we're going to lose about half the engineers from big companies, which is scary.

  From IDEs to AI Agents with Steve Yeggeyoutube.com

Hosts the Lex Fridman Podcast — long, unhurried conversations with scientists, engineers and public figures. Several of the interviews quoted elsewhere on this site are episodes of it.

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  Being an excellent programmer is a burden rather than an advantage when learning to work with coding agents.

  coding agents

  Their words

  It’s actually how good they are at programming is almost a burden in their ability to empathize with the system that’s starting from scratch. It’s a totally new paradigm of, like, how to program. You really, really have to empathize.

  youtube.com

Software entrepreneur who bootstrapped and sold FeedbackPanda and now builds Podscan; writes The Bootstrapped Founder.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Direct communication with customers matters more than small, incremental product tweaks.

  Their words

  That communication with the customer is more important than minimal, gradual improvement.

  thebootstrappedfounder.com

American author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck and Everything Is F*cked. Writes essays and book reviews at markmanson.net.

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  New Year's goals are merely the path toward a person's underlying purpose, not the destination itself.

  Their words

  People make this mistake of setting new goals every January 1st, but forget that goals are the path, not the destination.

  4 Simple Steps to Change Your Lifemarkmanson.net

American author of Liar's Poker, Moneyball, The Big Short and The Undoing Project, and host of the podcast Against the Rules.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A writer's audience does not carry from one book to the next: every book is another startup you have to make happen from scratch.

  startups

  Their words

  I see no evidence that I'm dragging people along with me. I feel like each each book feels like another startup and that I've got to go out and make it happen almost as if I've not written one.

  10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis)youtube.com

Head of growth at Chess.com, previously growth and monetization lead at Grammarly and Duolingo and a product manager at Google.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The value of an ambitious experiment target is not hitting it but the conversation about what would have to be true to hit it.

  Their words

  And a thousand experiments by itself, like if you just did that, but you didn't learn, you didn't make an impact, and that's kind of a waste of time, right? The whole point of setting a goal is that you can have conversations about what would need to be true to actually hit that goal.

  youtube.com

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  Ensorcelled

  Their words

  Ensorcelled by Eliot Peper is genius. It’s a unique format that can be read in one setting. The writing is beautiful.

  feld.com

Founded PSPDFKit in 2011 and ran it for a decade. Came back from a break to work on AI agents — the OpenClaw project, and OpenAI, joined in February 2026. Writes at steipete.me.

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  Claude Code

  Their words

  TL;DR: Ghostty + Claude Code + minimal tooling = maximum productivity.

  steipete.me

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Setting a worse task against the one you are avoiding is a procrastination hack that actually works.

  Their words

  It’s when you really don’t want to do a thing that you imagine a thing you don’t want to do more that’s worse than that and then in that way, you procrastinate by not doing the thing that’s worse. It’s a nice hack, it actually works.

  youtube.com

Co-founder of Sundial; former vice president of product design at Facebook; author of The Making of a Manager; writes The Looking Glass.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The most powerful rule for an exceptional interface is that it feels obvious to use; novelty, minimalism and simplicity are means to that, not the end.

  Their words

  Sometimes designers will go to great lengths to make a user interface novel, or minimal, or simple. This is the wrong goal. Novelty, minimalism or simplicity are good heuristics for obviousness, but do not mistake the means for the end.

  lg.substack.com

Programmer and streamer; was an engineer at Netflix, now teaches and argues about editors, Vim and how people learn to program.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  To actually understand a piece of technology, rebuild it from scratch rather than read about it.

  Their words

  I highly recommend starting from scratch if you want to understand a concept. You don't know how an HTTP server works, create a TCP socket, learn how to parse HTTP.

  youtube.com

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  How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

  Their words

  The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom, How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Principles for a Changing World Order

  balajis.com

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  A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

  Their words

  The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom, How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Principles for a Changing World Order

  balajis.com

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  How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler

  Their words

  The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom, How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Principles for a Changing World Order

  balajis.com

+ 2 more

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  The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch

  Their words

  The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom, How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Principles for a Changing World Order

  balajis.com

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  Principles for a Changing World Order

  Their words

  The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom, How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Principles for a Changing World Order

  balajis.com

Executive coach for product leaders. Previously a partner at GV (Google Ventures) and a product manager at Google. Writes at Bring the Donuts, including a standing essential-reading list for product managers.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Good storytelling doesn't require inventing something entirely new; it can be built from existing material.

  Their words

  One myth of good storytelling is that it requires dreaming up something entirely new from scratch. That's not necessary.

  Storytelling for Product Leadersbringthedonuts.com

Growth advisor and operator who has led growth at Miro, Amplitude, Dropbox and SurveyMonkey.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  No growth initiative should ever be started from scratch.

  Their words

  And number one thing that whenever you have an initiative or whenever you have a metric that you need to go and move, do not start from scratch ever. Do not start from scratch.

  youtube.com

Archaeologist of the Maya and the ancient Americas; directs the Maya Exploration Center and presents the ArchaeoEd podcast.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The Inca stones were not fitted by patient pecking with hammer stones; they were fused with acid.

  Their words

  The common archeological wisdom that you’d find out of a textbook is that they just kept pecking away at it with hammer stones and setting them and resetting them until they were perfect, which has to be bullshit, that there is no way that they just were that meticulous. I mean, everybody’s got a hammerstone. I personally think it’s acids.

  youtube.com

Software engineer who writes the blog Made of Bugs about performance, debugging and understanding computer systems. Previously worked at Anthropic on interpretability, at Stripe on Sorbet, and at Ksplice.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Rapidly growing organizations need a developer environment that works well out of the box for new engineers

  Their words

  In a rapidly growing organization, it's much more important to have a developer environment that "just works" out of the gate, with minimal setup pain for new engineers.

  Stripe's monorepo developer environmentblog.nelhage.com

Engineer and writer on machine-learning systems; author of Designing Machine Learning Systems and AI Engineering. "I work to bring AI into production. I write about AI system design."

• Our readingkorrents.com

  As models get better at following instructions, techniques like finetuning and constrained sampling for structured outputs will become less necessary

  Their words

  I suspect that in the future, it'll be easier to get models to output exactly what we need with minimal prompting, and these techniques will become less important.

  huyenchip.com

Founded SpaceX in 2002, joined Tesla's board in 2004 and became its chief executive in 2008; later founded Neuralink, The Boring Company and xAI. Bought Twitter in 2022 and renamed it X, where he now posts many times a day.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  No electric motor suitable for a humanoid robot existed anywhere in the world, so every part of Optimus had to be designed from scratch.

  Their words

  Because you think of how many electric motors are made in the world. There’s like tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of electric motor designs. None of them were suitable for a humanoid robot, literally none.

  youtube.com

Staff writer at The New Yorker, where he writes the Infinite Scroll column, and author of Filterworld and The Longing for Less.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Zojirushi

  Their words

  Turn on the rice cooker for normal or quick cooking (I have a Zojirushi, either setting works).

  kylechayka.substack.com

Co-founder and chief executive of Meta Platforms, the company he started as Facebook in 2004.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Building an AI that embodies a real person is a much harder problem than inventing a new AI character from scratch.

  Their words

  So that's a lot of what I think we need to nail for the creators, and that's why that one is actually a much harder problem, I think, than starting with new characters that you're creating from scratch.

  youtube.com

Engineer writing about the physical economy — oil and gas, manufacturing, batteries, drones and what it costs to build things.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Cargo ships can be electrified with a cheap, heavy, low-performance battery, because carrying heavy things cheaply is the one thing ships are good at.

  energy

  Their words

  Ships are great at carrying bulky and heavy stuff with minimal cost and energy usage. We need a battery chemistry that leans into that and sacrifices performance to reduce cost.

  Why Battery Powered Cargo Ships are Compellingaustinvernon.site

Pseudonymous essayist. Writes at gwern.net on AI scaling, statistics, genetics and long-running internet research, with heavy citation and a habit of revising old essays in place rather than leaving them wrong.

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  The Black Company

  Their words

  I enjoyed the first book a great deal: it’s in a fairly stock medieval setting, but it handles the dark fantasy well

  gwern.net

Co-founder of Microsoft and of the Gates Foundation. Writes Gates Notes on global health, energy and climate, and on whatever they have been reading.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  The Lincoln Highway

  Their words

  Once again, I was wowed by Towles’s writing—especially because The Lincoln Highway is so different from A Gentleman in Moscow in terms of setting, plot, and themes.

  gatesnotes.com

Ancient and military historian; writes A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, long series checking what history actually says against how popular culture tells it.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Urban life in the West did not merely change after Rome, it practically vanished, and had to be built again from scratch centuries later.

  Their words

  the system of social organization that characterized the ancient world practically vanished and would have to be redeveloped centuries later.

  acoup.blog

Co-founder of Netscape and of the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz. Argues at length for building things, mostly in short form.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Young founders who appear to have no track record have almost always been working inside their problem for years already.

  startups

  Their words

  the reality is the kids that make new things work from scratch. It actually turns out that they actually have been deep in the domain for a long time. Almost every case, they've been thinking hard about the problem that they're trying to solve actually for in in a lot of cases for many years.

  youtube.com

Co-founded GiveWell and led Open Philanthropy; writes Cold Takes, on the most important century and how to think about it.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Occasionally suspending your trust in everyone and digging into one question as deeply as you can is the single most formative thing you can do for how you think.

  Their words

  Minimal-trust investigation is probably the single activity that's been most formative for the way I think.

  cold-takes.com

Writer on time, productivity and limitation; wrote Four Thousand Weeks and Meditations for Mortals, and the newsletter The Imperfectionist.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The only thing a productivity system can do for you is help you choose slightly better what to do right now.

  Their words

  In the end, the only point of any personal productivity system, goal-setting technique or "life planning" exercise is to help you make a slightly better decision about what to do, right now

  List one task, do it, cross it outoliverburkeman.com

Technical educator, conference speaker and developer relations engineer based in Ottawa, Canada. Author of the Anubis bot filter and of over 400 articles at xeiaso.net.

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  suckless tools

  Their words

  Suckless offers an alternative to this continuous cycle of bloat and meaningless redesign. Suckless tools aim to keep things simple, minimal, usable and hackable by default.

  xeiaso.net

President of the VideoLAN non-profit and one of the lead developers of the VLC media player; active on the project since 2005.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  KDE/Plasma

  Their words

  My desktop is KDE/Plasma, tweaked to a minimal state, with very few widgets.

  usesthis.com

Sociologist and founder of Bismarck Analysis; writes on live players, institutional decay and why societies lose knowledge.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Repairing a dysfunctional institution is harder than building a functional one from scratch, because its internal forces resist change and the dysfunction is hard to diagnose in the first place.

  Their words

  It is much more difficult to make a dysfunctional institution functional than to create a functional institution from scratch; institutions will nearly always have internal forces that resist change, and diagnosing institutional dysfunction in the first place is challenging.

  Functional Institutions are the Exceptionsamoburja.com

Software design writer and chief scientist at Thoughtworks; wrote Refactoring and Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Successful microservice systems almost always began as a monolith that grew too big, and systems built as microservices from scratch end up in serious trouble.

  Their words

  Almost all the successful microservice stories have started with a monolith that got too big and was broken up

  MonolithFirstmartinfowler.com

Statistician and Chief Scientist at Posit (RStudio). Author of the ggplot2, dplyr and tidyverse R packages and of books on R programming and data science.

• Mixed onrcmnd.app

  Adium

  Their words

  I use Adium for chat, because you can make it v. minimal, but Google's crippling of XMPP has made less useful and I have to use Gchat as well.

  usesthis.com

Mathematical physicist at UC Riverside. Wrote This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics and now the Azimuth blog on mathematics, physics and environmental science.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Control System Design

  Their words

  Control System Design by Bernard Friedland. Control theory rocks! I've been meaning to learn it for years. The math is easy, but the idea of setting up feedback loops to stabilize systems is cool, and the techniques to do it optimally are really fun.

  usesthis.com

Programmer, photographer and musician, best known for the Python Requests HTTP library and other Python tooling.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Terminal.app

  Their words

  I use Zsh in the fantastically minimal Terminal.app.

  usesthis.com

Technologist and entrepreneur; former CTO of Threadless and chief technology officer of the 2012 Obama re-election campaign.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Pack and Smooch Hampshire pouch

  Their words

  Inside of these bags, my air lives in its own Pack and Smooch Hampshire pouch. It is felt and leather and was designed to not scratch up your air. Looks great too.

  usesthis.com