Top all-time · #410
Maggie Appleton
Personal blog · maggieappleton.comdesignprogrammingwriting
Maggie Appleton's personal blog at maggieappleton.com covers design, programming and writing. Since 2020, 136 different Hacker News readers have linked it 212 times, most often “A Brief History and Ethos of the Digital Garden”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-14, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 4 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Maggie Appleton's essays on digital gardens, home-cooked and barefoot software, the dark forest theory of the web, and bidirectional links. Commenters cite them as the reference for these ideas and recommend her blog in general.
- Recommended for · 4 comments
- One commenter says to read her blog as a favourite; another calls her 'the ever excellent' writer; another says she is among the cool people with blogs worth re
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Maggie Appleton's digital garden of visual essays, notes, and patterns about programming, design, anthropology, and software.
Most-linked posts?
- A Brief History and Ethos of the Digital Garden18 people · 21 mentions · first linked 2021-07-08
- The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI15 people · 25 mentions · first linked 2023-01-03
- Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers14 people · 21 mentions · first linked 2024-06-02
- The dark forest and the cozy web9 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2022-03-11
- GitHub Ace - an Experimental Collaboraite Agentic Coding Environment9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2026-04-14
- Programming Portals7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2022-10-23
- /7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2020-08-06
- Sketchy ideas for UI that play with the novel capabilities of language models6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2023-06-12
- Gathering Structures6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2024-02-22
- Illustrated Notes for “Building a Second Brain”5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-06-14
What Hacker News says?
I'm a fan of Maggie Appleton's Digital Garden idea: https://maggieappleton.com/garden It's a "ideas as a garden" metaphor, not necessarily a "product as a garden" metaphor, but the sentiment is the same.
Comment linking /garden
on “My product is my garden”Submitted Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers as a story · 322 points
HN discussionHopefully my cooking analogy helps a tiny bit? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41448649 Similar a bit to Maggie Appleton's barefoot developers vibe too: https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software
Comment linking /home-cooked-software
on “Dynamicland 2024”Submitted Folk Interfaces as a story · 223 points
HN discussionAre you trying to stick with company blogs primarily, or to expand into general non-affiliated eng blogs? People like Maggie Appleton ( https://maggieappleton.com/ ) and Patrick McKenzie ( https://www.kalzumeus.com/ ) frequently have compelling ideas around technology, but I suppose that's a different "product" from what a company blog is selling.
Comment linking /
on “Show HN: Engineering.fyi – Search across tech engineering blogs in one place”Submitted Tools for thought as cultural practices, not computational objects as a story · 187 points
HN discussionCheck this out! https://maggieappleton.com/api
Comment linking /api
on “How HTTPS Works”Submitted Illustrated Notes for “Building a Second Brain” as a story · 181 points
HN discussionAlways gonna plug Maggie Appleton's seminal work on digital gardening whenever conversations about personal knowledge systems come up. It has some great resources in there https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history
Comment linking /garden-history
on “Zim – A Desktop Wiki”Submitted Programming Portals as a story · 148 points
HN discussionFor people who want more examples of this “vibe”, here’s a tiny subset of places / people / projects to check out: https://futureofcoding.org/catalog/ https://cristobal.space/writing/folk-computer.html https://dynamicland.org/ https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/ https://www.geoffreylitt.com/ https://maggieappleton.com/folk-interfaces
Comment linking /folk-interfaces
on “Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers”Submitted Programmable Notes as a story · 132 points
HN discussionMy site [1] tends to get linked to by these kinds of things (well, more than by normal things) so I've found a few just through referrer traffic, and joining webrings has been fun too. https://gossipsweb.net https://fediring.net https://nightfall.city https://linkbudz.m455.casa https://indieblog.page https://indieweb.xyz https://stumblingon.com https://webring.dinhe.net https://hotlinewebring.club https://handmade-w…
Comment linking /cozy-web
on “Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)”Submitted Faking William Morris, Generative Forgery, and the Erosion of Art History as a story · 111 points
HN discussionThe challenges here feel insurmountable, but I can't help but feel there's a certain inevitability to the de-monolithization de-totalization of the domain of computing being ensconced so wholly as it is inside of applications, experiences purely pre-defined by a given app. Already with AI we are seeing a huge uptick in people's expectations that agents operate across apps. The app is losing its monopoly of power, is…
Comment linking /home-cooked-software/
on “Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps”Submitted Ambient Co-Presence as a story · 106 points
HN discussionStrong Xanadu vibes. Not surprising to see, since at least one of the people involved isn't new to trudging through the history of hypertext and has several Xanadu writeups. (See the backlinks on < https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history >.)
Comment linking /garden-history
on “The Block Protocol”Submitted A Brief History and Ethos of the Digital Garden as a story · 45 points
HN discussionhttps://maggieappleton.com/garden-history How about a digital garden post about digital gardens:?
Comment linking /garden-history
on “BlogScroll – An open directory of personal sites and blogs”Submitted Gas Town's Agent Patterns, Design Bottlenecks, and Vibecoding at Scale as a story · 35 points
HN discussionThanks for replying. :) > If you are putting an effort to curate and grow your own site, is that not a digital garden? That's really stretching the definition IMO. What characterizes a garden is the slow growth and constant pruning — the making of a personal wiki. https://indieweb.org/digital_garden and https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history are good intros to gardens. Most of the websites I visited seemed to be…
Comment linking /garden-history
on “BlogScroll – An open directory of personal sites and blogs”Submitted The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI as a story · 22 points
HN discussionhttps://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest As AI takes over the public internet (the trees) the people will retreat to safe underground spaces where they know only authentic humans live.
Comment linking /ai-dark-forest
on “Group chats rule the world”Submitted Block-based interfaces can help us create more structured data on the web as a story · 14 points
HN discussionSomething I've been thinking about is what happens once the market for software developers becomes saturated. I think the answer is something along the lines of blending traditionally off-line skills (illustration, etc), domain knowledge, and software together. The ability to leverage the scale of the internet is still a form of tech-thinking, even if the software engineering part is not the main focus. I think soft…
Comment linking /
on “The Hacker Way: How I taught my nephew to program”Submitted Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers as a story · 10 points
HN discussion> I know I work at GitHub so that might sound heretical, but I promise it’s not controversial for me to say it. Very few people internally believe that PRs and issues are ideal primitives for the future of engineering. And there are a lots of us inside the machine exploring what comes next. From GitHub's Staff Research Engineer https://maggieappleton.com/zero-alignment/
Comment linking /zero-alignment/
on “Ghostty is leaving GitHub”Submitted Home-cooked software and barefoot developers as a story · 9 points
HN discussionNot sure if it'll help you, but do read this: https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history Perhaps all you need is a perspective shift. Wishing you luck with your personal writing journey!
Comment linking /garden-history
on “Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram”Submitted Planning with Agents: Divided Worlds, Boundary Objects, and Thicker Interfaces as a story · 5 points
HN discussion
