John covers his extensive history as a Mac enthusiast, web developer, writer, podcaster and lover of music and art. He also explains his transition to a fully independent career on the Internet and how he has juggled various personas, roles and fandoms over the years.

Podcast case study: Accidental Tech Podcast (producer)

Find John at hypercritical.co.

Read a transcript of the episode as a styled PDF or in plain text.

Links and Show Notes

I Was Primed 00:00:00

Mur Lafferty
Geek Fu Action Grip (now in the Internet Archive)
I Should Be Writing
iPod
iTunes
NPR
Apple Inc.
YouTuber
Dan Benjamin
RSS
Hypercritical (podcast)
Gabe Newell
Valve Corporation
Half-Life (series)
Portal (series)
Ars Technica
Book review: Infinite Loop — John’s first article for Ars Technica
Ivory tower
Hypercritical (the mentioned article from John’s Ars Technica blog, now linked on his website)
Steve Jobs

I Had the Cultural Context 00:08:22

Multiple ‘Me’s 00:20:13

Accidental Tech Podcast (ATP)
A text file online that preserves information from John’s U2 Lyrics Archive
Perl
CPAN
5by5
Jason Snell
The Incomparable
Robot or Not?
Merlin Mann
Back to Work
Marco Arment
Build and Analyze was a weekly news and discussion show about technology by Marco Arment and Dan Benjamin, which can now be found in the Internet Archive.
Casey Liss
Hypercritical (website)
Independence Day (blog post about John’s career transition)
Open source

A Childhood Dream 00:33:42

BASIC
HyperCard
Computer programming
Web developer
Below are blog posts about John’s two Mac apps:
- Front and Center; and
- SwitchGlass, along with the more recent SwitchGlass 2.0.
Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC)
API
iOS
CodeWarrior
App Store (iOS/iPadOS)
Mac App Store

Apple Tech-nerd World 00:42:18

AnandTech
Tom’s Hardware
Microsoft Windows
Windows 95
Celeron
Context collapse
Fandom
Anti-fan
Some references to terminals include:
- computer terminal;
- terminal emulator; and
- Terminal (macOS).
‘Seeing the matrix’ means seeing the true nature of reality (or any particular situation) and is a phrase from The Matrix franchise.
Marvel Comics
DC Comics
Ford Mustang
Chevrolet Camaro
Tom Cruise
New York City
The Incomparable Mothership
Twitter
Mastodon (social network)

Repotting Myself 00:59:13

John’s use of the initialism ‘m.o.’ refers to the Latin term ‘modus operandi’, which is translated approximately as ‘mode (or manner) of operating’.
ARM architecture family (John’s reference to ‘ARM Macs’, running Apple Silicon)
John Gruber
BMX bike
Remote-control car

Credits

Recorded and edited by Martin Feld, using Audio Hijack and Ferrite Recording Studio

Martin’s edit in Ferrite

Original podcast theme music by Alex Canion

Contact

A Special Note

Martin is a paid subscriber of John Siracusa’s shared membership program for Accidental Tech Podcast; this did not influence any of the questions that were asked and did not place any expectations on John as a participant of this academic podcasting project.

#91: Back-to-School Community-Building Ideas