What makes the Danes the happiest people in the world? Meik Weiking, the CEO of the Happiness Research Institute, writes a delightfully small book about the concept of hygge.

Building a feature store at DoorDash, radial data visualizations, and writing programming comics.

Another book that I’ve read over the past couple of weeks was Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep. Walker distilled perhaps the most complex biological phenomenon into an accessible 300 pages, and he taught me a lot about this essential process. (Update: maybe not!)

How to Do Nothing is perhaps the best book I read this year. Written as a series of loosely linked essays about finding your place in the world, Jenny Odell’s writing conveyed how deeply personal this journey is.

This week’s reading features the cycle of content moderation controversies (from a wonderful article titled “What Pornhub and Peloton have in common with Facebook”), along with thoughts on language servers and static site generators.

On quirks in Ruby, leaving code better than you found it, VS Code shortcuts, and graph neural networks. Happy Thanksgiving, for those in the US!

The COVID-19 situation in Illinois is dire. The media doesn’t seem to be talking about it, even though the situation is presently worse here than it was in many places over the summer. What gives?

I review Nir Eyal’s Hooked, a 200-page manual for creating habit-forming products. It’s clear that his steps work—examples from several common products readily support them. But I question whether this is being used for good or evil.