Friends

People worth
your time

An old-school blogroll. Most of these people I have never met — I read them, learn from them, and think you should know about them. Linking out costs nothing and gives something away, which is most of the point.

Craft & Making

People who care how a thing is made, not just that it shipped.

  • Scott Boms

    Creative director and letterpress printmaker. Writes about care, craft, and the idea that there is such a thing as enough.

  • Robert Wringham

    Writer and comedian who publishes New Escapologist, a small-press magazine nineteen issues deep, and puts out other authors alongside his own books.

  • Julian Bleecker

    Runs Near Future Laboratory, which builds the artifacts of imagined futures as a way of arguing about the present.

  • Austin Kleon

    Wrote Steal Like an Artist. Makes the case for daily practice, paper notebooks, and showing the work before it is finished.

The Independent Web

People who write and build on their own sites, and kept doing it the whole time.

  • Robin Sloan

    Wrote Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, and treats fiction and software as the same kind of work. Given how I spend my days, nobody here fits better.

  • Ellane W

    Plain text, Obsidian, stationery, and accessibility. Runs her site as a think tank and playground, with no paywalls anywhere on it.

  • Maggie Appleton

    Illustrated essays on digital gardens, and one of the clearest thinkers on what a personal website is actually for.

  • Derek Sivers

    Founded CD Baby, sold it, and gave the proceeds to a charitable trust. Invented the /now page, which is why this site has one.

  • Duncan Rawlinson

    Keeps /now, /quotes, and /cooltools. A serious collector of the small pages that make a personal site personal.

  • Nick Gray

    Founded Museum Hack and wrote The 2-Hour Cocktail Party. He started /friends and emailed me about it, which is the reason this page exists.

Builders & Operators

People building real businesses without a large company behind them.

  • Ania Wysocka

    Bootstrapped Rootd, an app for managing panic attacks, alone to more than three million users. Before that she ran a digital marketing bootcamp that served six thousand small businesses.

  • Ned Dwyer

    Founder several times over, with twenty years of operator relationships to show for it.

  • Ryan Doyle

    Writes about the people behind solo businesses, starting from the observation that building on the internet only looks solo from the outside.

13 people, and the list will grow. If you keep a personal site and think you belong here, tell me.

This is a /friends page, inspired by slashfriends.org and Nick Gray.