I want to feel the hand of the f%#king creator

It's not divine intervention; it's just someone who did a damn good job.

North Carolina summers are like being slowly baked inside a damp sock. Triple-digit heat. Humidity so thick you could bottle it and sell it as soup. It’s the kind of weather that makes you question your life choices.

But the moment you step into a perfectly air-conditioned room: one that hits you with that crisp, fresh chill on a blistering day - that is what salvation feels like. Not just relief, but a stark, physical reminder of the incredible effort that has gone into the built environment.

Now and then, I get the same feeling from software, too. When someone really puts every bit of their intellectual might into making something that feels alive.

Blue Prince and Animal Well are two recent games that twist themselves into meta-puzzles, daring you to notice every pixel. I hardly play games at all nowadays, but I can feel the love in every corner of these worlds. It’s intoxicating.

Small touches added to Android - instant translation of any text on any screen (even from an image!), no app-switching needed. Spam calls? Silenced. Texts from bots? Blocked. It feels like magic, but it’s just good design.

PostHog's new AI Wizard - I ran a single npx command and it read my codebase, set up analytics, and configured AI suggestions like it knew exactly what was needed for Craftwork's specific architecture. That’s not a fluke - that’s care, craftsmanship, and context-awareness built into the bones.

These examples are more than just little features. They’re evidence of effort, of risk, of someone pushing past “good enough.”

And that’s the work that sticks with me; because it has a pulse.

Recreating that sensation... the feeling of a blast of AC on a boiling day - is what I want to do with every product I work on.

What will it take to give your work a pulse?

In the latest turn in the Epic Games v Apple legal saga, Apple is now required to allow developers to link to external payment options without imposing additional fees or restrictions. With the freedom and the complexities of taking payments for your app on the web, the real question is: what to do next? Join Paddle as they answer your burning questions and give practical advice you can execute today.

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One of the things I like most about my job is being able to take inspiration from all over the place. These are some of the things that have stuck with me recently:

• Unreasonable Hospitality is The best book I've read in the past year, hands down. I liked it so much I read it twice, wrote a newsletter about it, and bought copies for friends and teammates.
• The Besties Podcast on Blue Prince is what convinced me that there was something special in the source code for the game. Host Justin McElroy's quote about "feeling the hand of the creator" sold me on it. What a masterpiece.