Twelve hundred pounds of paint
Boeing offers a tour of their production facility (the largest building in the world by volume!), which is one of the auxiliary Seattle things that I never did when I first moved here but finally did this weekend when a friend was visiting from out of town.
It was awesome.
The coolest part of it was something not easily describable over email: the sheer scale of the facility. It was pointillism writ large: anywhere you looked there was an entire ecosystem of parts and rivets, engines and tubes and cranes in varying states of use, completion, and disrepair.
It was something halfway in between an industrial utopia and an industrial dystopia: a dizzying array of substructures and planes, seemingly chaotic and lawless on the surface but, upon further examination, had a certain evolutionary precision and flow to them. I wanted to know exactly how time and experience weathered the facility into its current state: the result of hundreds and hundreds of niche desire paths. I could have spent hours staring at each little subsection, connecting the dots of how the entire thing worked as a unit.
Seriously. It was awesome..
(It made me think about software.)
Our guide was incredible, too, sporting the largest mutton chops I’ve ever seen and a deep booming baritone. Here are my two favorite Boeing facts that he shared:
- On average, the paint on an aircraft (like, where it says Alaska Airlines and has the brand’s color and such) causes the plane to weigh an additional twelve hundred pounds. That’s a non-trivial amount of pounds! Our guide joked that a couple customers had to run the numbers on whether or not the exterior branding was even worth the extra cost of fuel caused by the paint.
- The 747 contains over two hundred miles worth of wiring.
(Both of those made me think about software, too.)
Some stuff about Buttondown because obviously I’m going to talk about the tool I built to send this email
It’s been a quiet week, mostly spent on marketing infrastructure and pre-launch stuff, which has been a nice way to quell the urge to code. (Plus, as always: bug fixes. At least the bugs are growing rarer and more arcane.)
Still, I shipped a few fun (and ostensibly useful!) screens:
This coming week will be one last round of tire-kicking, making sure no critical paths are (too) broken, and getting a few UX audits in. I’m getting pretty excited to shift my focus from inward-looking to outward-looking!
Three things I liked this week
- A tiny studio under a bridge is marvelous in the literal sense of the word. The creator’s writing on it is beautiful, too:
I would like to present my latest project related to huts. Not the type of idyllic hut you would find in the middle of the woods but rather tiny spaces recovered from the city itself were you can hide from the city’s hectic pace. These are locations that due to its architecture, location or size have become useless and people hardly notice when walking by. When we discover, analyze and inhabit these places it reminds us of the feelings of isolation, peace and protection we experienced during childhood when hiding under the dining table surrounded with a long table cloth all around.
- Old Tokyo, a sprawling online museum of vintage Japanese postcards.
- Responsive pixel art, a fascinating experiment in mutability that is impressive both in technical and aesthetic terms.