The Wayfarer by Gun.io. March 31st, 2023.

I've been surprised by a lot of things in my adult life, but I never could have guessed just how many times I'd find myself in the position of deciding what on earth to write about in my silly little weekly newsletter for techies after yet another tragedy in my town. 

When our collective consciousness is bogged down by an unconscionable event, it seems ridiculous to go about life as normal—which, for me, means sharing my weird and wild internet travels with you all every Friday. It's like I have one foot in a world that's still turning and another in a world that's frozen in place. I'm sure many of you have had experiences like these. 

What I come back to every time is this: for every newsletter, marketing email, or outbound message in our inboxes, there is a person on the other end who is, very likely, going through some human experience to which we can all relate. This is obviously always true, but it never feels more acute to me than in the wake of something terrible.

At the end of the day, the brands we interact with and the work we do are just a collection of human activities, driven by, of course, humans. That is simultaneously very obvious and very hard to remember. I hope we can all keep sight of that as we go about our days and remember to treat each other—including brands and businesses—with care and empathy. 

Thanks for sticking around, y'all. If you have Nashville on your heart this week, one way you can monetarily contribute to our city's healing is by donating to Daystar, which will provide ongoing crisis and trauma counseling to the children who experienced the events at The Covenant School. 

- Faith

1. Just in case your calendars weren't marked, I'll remind you: this week, we celebrated Fabio Day. If you're new here: "Fabio showing up to promote a new roller coaster, then getting hit in the face by a goose is the funniest thing that has ever happened." This is required reading. 

2. On an upcoming episode of The Frontier, I interview the CEO of Creative Navy, a UK-based design agency. Their approach to design is incredibly rooted in data, and they open source their findings on their blog. Here's a neat rabbit hole for those interested in Mission Control Software design patterns. 

3. If you're curious about what's going on with the "TikTok ban" legislation, here's your primer, along with a rundown of what this could mean for VPNs. 

4. See below.

What if there was a way to understand how biased your news source is? That's the problem Seekr's CEO, Pat Condo, set out to solve. This week, I sit down with Pat to talk about how to promote truth in reporting, his rich history in working with the defense and intelligence community, and that time he helped to launch a space shuttle. Audio and transcript here. 

A last-ditch effort to prove the Pixar Image Computer was a valuable tool for entertainment and not just scientific imaging proved to be the serendipitous beginning of a new genre in animation when Tin Toy won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short in 1989. Lucky for me, today's guest, Richie Clark, knows quite a bit about the Pixar film catalog. Audio and transcript here. 

We have 739 folks ready to interview and get to work this week. Here are three folks I'd hire if I could: 

⚡️ Andrew B, a senior full-stack engineer with specific expertise in e-commerce development. 

⚡️ Gerald P, a senior software engineer with expertise in React, AWS, and Django. 

⚡️ Mislav S, a full-stack engineer with experience leading development teams as CTO.