It’s a great week of reading with lots of fun stuff to get through, including a lovely quote on marketing that’ll stick in my head, excellent illustrations teaching us all about Big O, and more. Let’s get to it!

An Illustrated Guide to OAuth - by Aditya Bhargava

Link: https://www.ducktyped.org/p/an-illustrated-guide-to-oauth

OAuth was created at Twitter?? Who knew! A nice visual guide here that lays things out really clearly. Personally I really think APIs should allow both a simple token and OAuth as often as possible, as sometimes you’re just trying to do a one-off operation, and passing a token is so much simpler than doing the whole dance and making your connector service stateful to retain the tokens.

Big O

Link: https://samwho.dev/big-o/

Sam consistently posts at a seriously high level and it really shows in this one. Look at the effort that goes into these animations and examples - the interactive bubble sort visualizer, the timing demos you can actually run - let alone the thorough explanation that makes Big O actually digestible.

Marketing is…

Link: https://world.hey.com/jason/marketing-is-8d39f651

‘Marketing is a transfer of enthusiasm’. That’s gonna stick with me for a while. It’s one of those things that’s easy to know but very hard to live by, but we all feel it - the stuff I get excited about always comes from someone who was genuinely pumped about what they were building, and you can feel that energy come through. It’s so different to hollow sloganeering you see everywhere.

You Have to Feel It

Link: https://mitchellh.com/writing/feel-it

“This is what metrics, specifications and demos miss”. You have to get so good at really being the user, properly understanding and empathising with their needs, and then there’s a resounding clarity when you find the thing that solves their problem. Suddenly it all fits. It’s a gut feeling and it’s electrifying. Best thing about building.

You no longer need JavaScript

Link: https://lyra.horse/blog/2025/08/you-dont-need-js/

I love CSS, especially now we have nesting which was clearly SCSS’s best feature and makes everything more readable. Variables are awesome too and this is a great write up of a whole bunch of stuff I didn’t know about. You don’t need JS for everything!