Making Software
Dan Hollick's illustrated reference book explaining how the software and hardware people use every day actually work under the hood — touch screens, Gaussian blur, bezier curves, rasterization, image compression. A standing source of design inspiration and "cool insights": the explanations are good, but the hand-built diagrams are themselves a craft reference. Source: User, 2026-06-13
By Dan Hollick (@DanHollick) — design engineer at Tailwind Labs, ex-Raycast, known for diagram-heavy "how X works" threads ("How does a screen work?", "How ChatGPT works"). The premise: as tools got more complex, our understanding got shallower; this book restores the deep mental model. Explicitly not actionable ("won't make you a better designer tomorrow") and not technical-prerequisite — the diagrams (drawn by hand in Figma) do the heavy lifting. Source: makingsoftware.com, https://www.makingsoftware.com, 2026-06-13
What it covers
Worked explanations of primitives behind everyday interfaces: capacitive touch screens (electrode grids sensing field disturbance), Gaussian blur (kernel/weight matrices), the pen tool / bezier curves (Figma handles), rasterization + anti-aliasing (smooth curves on a pixel grid), and image compression. Source: makingsoftware.com, 2026-06-13
Status (early access)
- $99 early access; chapters released as finished. Source: makingsoftware.com, 2026-06-13
- Progress at capture: 20 / 32 chapters, ~3.4K words + ~37 images per chapter, 68.1K words / 741 images so far (est. 108.9K final). Source: makingsoftware.com, 2026-06-13
- Image-compression chapter published 2026-06-11 to celebrate the launch — the hook: ".png was created out of spite" and ".jpeg discards ~half the colors because you won't notice." Source: X/@DanHollick, 2026-06-11
Image-compression artifact
The reviewed tweet video scrolls the image-compression chapter rather than only showing a static cover. The local frames show the chapter page, color-space cube/parrot examples, channel and block diagrams, quantization-table style grids, and a right-side scale comparing JPEG, GIF, PNG, WebP, and glossary sections. The live chapter currently returns a Vercel Security Checkpoint / 429 to scripted fetches, so the reliable evidence for this pass is the preserved local X video thumbnail/contact-sheet review plus the earlier makingsoftware.com capture. Source: local video artifact review, 2026-07-01; raw/x-bookmarks/enriched/2065060480671010938.json
Stack fit (Kevin)
- Design inspiration + insight source — Kevin tracks it as a go-to for "cool insights" and diagram craft; browse it the way you'd browse Design Inspiration Galleries, except the inspiration is explanatory visual design and first-principles understanding rather than UI screens.
- Design-engineering depth — the "why pixels/curves/color behave this way" layer beneath Frontend and Design Skills and design-engineering-polish; understanding rasterization/anti-aliasing/compression sharpens judgment on image assets, blur/shadow performance, and export formats.
- Diagram reference — the hand-in-Figma illustrations are a model for how to explain a technical concept visually (useful for Kevin's own diagrams, posts, and docs).
- Reference, not workflow — catalogued in Design Engineering Resources as a canonical explainer; read for mental models, not a procedure to apply.
Timeline
- 2026-07-01 | Deep-reviewed the local image-compression video artifact; scripted live chapter fetches returned a Vercel Security Checkpoint / 429, so the review preserved the X video evidence and existing captured book facts rather than treating the current page as readable. Source: local video artifact review;
raw/x-bookmarks/enriched/2065060480671010938.json - 2026-06-11 | Dan Hollick published the image-compression chapter (png "out of spite", jpeg color discard) to celebrate the Making Software launch. 3,392 likes, 2,375 bookmarks. Source: X/@DanHollick, 2026-06-11
- 2026-06-13 | Page created from X bookmark absorption; facts from makingsoftware.com (20/32 chapters, $99 early access, scope). Source: makingsoftware.com, 2026-06-13