About
Hack/Make is written by Nick Wynja and is about creativity, craftsmanship, and working smarter.
Hack vs. Make
Hacking, both with code and life, has become popular. A hack is a way to take a shortcut around something difficult and get a result that will help you make progress, whether that solution is elegant or not. The progression is the good part of hacking but by only ever taking shortcuts you can miss out on a lot.
Making is design. Design is learning about what you’re trying to accomplish, what time, resources, and attention constraints we have, and joining that with a desire to solve problems in beautiful ways.
Both have places in our toolbox as we try to work smarter and become better people. Sometimes taking shortcuts makes us better. Sometimes spending hours, days, months planning something and doing it right sets the path of us becoming better.
I post links about things I find interesting and that relatable to the thread of ideas posted here. I publish essays that I hope will shift or refine perspectives. I write technical things about Macs and iOS that might help you set up your scaffolding.
You can follow Hack/Make via Twitter, RSS, or Mailing list.
Technology Stack
I believe that a technology stack should be transparent and that tools and workflows are important but not as important as the work you do. But since we are geeks, here are the details:
This site is run on my Continental fork of the Second Crack static, Markdown, Dropbox-syncing blogging engine. It’s valid HTML and CSS that’s hosted behind a Varnish caching layer on a Linode VPS. Type is set in Futura and FF Meta Sans. I write in Byword on iPad and BBEdit on the Mac and make the clackity noise using a Filco Majestouch 2 tenkeyless board with MX Cherry Blues.
You can read more in depth about my writing workflow.