Paul Welty, PhD AI, WORK, AND STAYING HUMAN

Make something great: Become an open source contributor

Unlock your potential and discover the rewarding journey of becoming an open source contributor, no matter your skill level.

My first contribution to Bootstrap was a tiny line of CSS. It was a no-brainer to merge, but the feeling of seeing that bit of code in the project’s codebase was unreal and addictive. You may think that open source is not for you. After all, it has always been a developer-dominant ecosystem….

Read full article at the publisher’s site: https://alistapart.com/article/make-something-great-become-an-open-source-contributor

Why customer tools are organized wrong

This article reveals a fundamental flaw in how customer support tools are designed—organizing by interaction type instead of by customer—and explains why this fragmentation wastes time and obscures the full picture you need to help users effectively.

Infrastructure shapes thought

The tools you build determine what kinds of thinking become possible. On infrastructure, friction, and building deliberately for thought rather than just throughput.

Server-side dashboard architecture: Why moving data fetching off the browser changes everything

How choosing server-side rendering solved security, CORS, and credential management problems I didn't know I had.

The work of being available now

A book on AI, judgment, and staying human at work.

The practice of work in progress

Practical essays on how work actually gets done.

The smartest code you'll ever delete

The most dangerous kind of waste isn't the thing that doesn't work. It's the thing that works beautifully and shouldn't exist.

The first real user breaks everything

Your product works until someone actually uses it. The gap between 'works in dev' and 'works for a person' is where most systems fail — and most organizations avoid looking.

The loop nobody bothers to close

Most systems observe. Almost none learn. The difference is a feedback loop — and the boring cleanup work that makes it possible.