Making steel accounts for about 8% of global carbon emissions. Coal-fired blast furnaces churn out two tons of carbon dioxide for every ton of steel. Swedish startup Stegra is betting nearly $7 billion that it can change this, building a plant that uses hydrogen made from renewable electricity. Steel production starts in 2026, and automakers like Mercedes and BMW are already lined up to pay a premium for it.

I expected to learn a lot of interesting things while onboarding at Webflow this week, but Webflow Design Language (WFDL) caught me off guard. I didn't have a purely functional programming language based on a lambda calculus with a Hindley–Milner type system on my bingo card — but there it is, and it’s a delightfully elegant solution.

Building an engineering platform starts by listening with a product mindset, not a project one. A platform is built with developers, for developers, and adoption will be a consequence of saving work and eliminating frustration, not the result of a command or mandate. When a developer watches a demo and says “I want that!” then you’ve won.

Earlier this year, I gave an interview about Tomcat and had fun going down memory lane. While preparing, I discovered that much of the material about Tomcat's origins has disappeared from the web. So I decided to do something about it and wrote about what happened from my perspective — from Daiquiri Summer to the JavaOne announcement.

Daniel Miessler points out that companies spending trillions to enable “just do it myself” looks smart in comparison to the $70 trillion spent annually for knowledge worker compensation. The unsettling question is: what happens to an economy built on labor when labor becomes optional? After all, nobody is obligated to create jobs.

I love Bryan Cantrill’s framework for LLM use at Oxide, grounded in the company’s values. He observes that there’s a social contract between readers and writers about the amount of work that has gone into a piece, and that LLM-generated prose breaks this contract. It maps to my own belief that LLMs should be used to make work better, not necessarily faster.

When I was an architecture student in school, deconstructivism was the buzz of the day and Frank Gehry was one of our prophets. His Vitra Design Museum in Germany was a building that I studied and loved. And even though I went a different way with my career, I’ve always greatly enjoyed his work including the Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Guggenheim Bilbao. What a great architect.

From the department of I did not see that coming: Jarred Sumner has announced that Anthropic is acquiring Bun. The expected path was cloud hosting. But then AI started getting good, Jarred got hooked on Claude Code — which is itself built on Bun now — and a few weeks ago he went on a four-hour walk with Boris from the Claude Code team to talk about joining forces. It’s a bit crazy, but it might just work.

For the last twelve years, Vancouver has been an amazing base for the main TED conference. The city is a generous host and I always enjoy my time there. But if TED has a home anywhere, it’s in California where it started in Monterey and then spent many years in Long Beach. Now, TED is going home to California, this time to San Diego. I’m really looking forward to it.

Congratulations to all my colleagues at Shopify who helped power another record setting Black Friday. Shopify processed $6.2 billion of sales, up 25% from last year, and peaked at 489 million requests per minute on the edge. That’s some serious scale, but more importantly it represents the collective economic activity of millions of merchants, many of them small businesses.