In this episode of the Naftiko Capabilities podcast we sit back down with Anil Dash — blogger, creator, and former founder of Glitch — for a follow-up to our Markdown conversation. This time we talk about why we blog, why the web is not done, and why the web is bending AI to its needs rather than the other way around.
Anil reframes storytelling as being “below the API line” — writing for the workers, the delivery drivers, the everyday people who interact with apps rather than the people who build them. We talk about debugging as an act of hope, the joy of Steve Yegge going full mad-scientist on his New Year’s Day blog, Simon Willison’s daily notes as a masterclass in just showing up, and why there is always a young coder on the other side of the world who will pick up the thread.
We also get into Anil’s experience being CEO of Glitch and the constraints that come with VC backing, what he is free to write now that he is not, and the argument that the highest mandate for people who have been in tech for twenty-plus years is teaching how systems actually work — especially for the people early in their careers or in vulnerable parts of them.
The first Anil episode, on Markdown, is a natural companion to this one — together they form a two-part argument about what actually matters when building technology that lasts.
