Make Your Own Thing
In the age of aspirational influencers, million-dollar podcast hosts, and so, so many newsletters, it's sometimes hard to imagine the very idea of making a career out of writing on the internet was once considered controversial. John Gruber has been writing at Daring Fireball for nearly a quarter of a century and managed to turn his unique and incisive takes on technology, the internet, and Apple Computer into not just a career but a framework for countless writers, podcasters, producers — an entire economy. He joins Jim to talk about those early days and what they might have in common with a post-platform internet, the slow boil of Markdown, and, of course, Apple. Links & Resources Daring Fireball John on Bluesky at gruber.foo Independent Days Dive Into Markdown Aaron Swartz's atx Dean Allen's Textile (archived) Github Flavored Markdown "The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste" The Standard Site community lexicon project for long form writing on atproto At.pm, a toolkit for building atproto apps in Perl Listen and read more at atproto.com/off-protocol/2026-09-11-make-your-own-thing-john-gruber Off Protocol is a production of the Bluesky developer relations team. For more about AT Protocol and an archive of this show, head to atproto.com. Our theme music was composed and produced by Saleem Reshamwala. Catch our livestream every other Wednesday at stream.place/atproto.com.