Writing

Writing

Thinking out loud about software design and development.

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What I learned from Staff Design

My takeaways, lessons learned, and next steps after interviewing eight high-level individual contributor product designers.

March 13, 2021

My playbook for shipping side projects

Tips and strategies I've learned for shipping side projects.

January 30, 2021

Becoming a better interviewer

What I've learned from studying interviewing principles and analyzing the meta elements of my favorite interviewers.

January 17, 2021

2020 in review

Looking back on 2020 and setting goals for the next year.

January 1, 2021

Reasons you aren't updating your personal site

Tips and strategies to painlessly manage a personal website.

December 20, 2020

Tailwind CSS first impressions

My pros and cons for the Tailwind CSS framework after one week.

November 29, 2020

Design to save people from themselves

How software can prevent people from making mistakes, causing permanent damage, or bringing about the collapse of democracy.

November 15, 2020

True respect is the difference

True respect is the difference between a fantastic collaborator and an asshole.

November 9, 2020

Writing better self reviews

My tips and strategies for writing effective self reviews.

November 2, 2020

2020 mid-year review

This year has been breezing by at an uncomfortable pace, so it is helpful to pause for a second and introspect a while.

July 3, 2020

Quality software

This post aims to outline the characteristics of software that we believe determine its fundamental quality.

May 18, 2020

Just-for-me authentication

How adding just-for-me authentication cascaded into new ideas and possibilities for play.

May 10, 2020

Using cookies to authenticate Next.js + Apollo GraphQL requests

In the spirit of over-complicating the hell out of my personal website, I spent time this weekend trying to solve one very small and seemingly-simple problem: can I make my website know when I am viewing it?

May 3, 2020

Incrementally correct personal websites

It's time to change the way I think about building and maintaining my personal website.

March 22, 2020

Automating the boring parts of product design

Building Figma plugins to automate the boring parts of product design.

March 15, 2020

The meta skills of product design

Exploring the meta skills that product designers can use to learn faster, work on more impactful products, or collaborate with more interesting people.

March 12, 2020

Product design portfolios

A living list of useful and inspiring product design portfolios.

March 7, 2020

The death of designer unicorns

It's no longer possible to be a "designer unicorn."

March 7, 2020

2019 in review

Looking back on 2019 and setting goals for the next year.

December 27, 2019

On working nights and weekends

While it might not be necessary to work nights and weekends, it does seem practically useful.

December 26, 2019

A primer on investing for designers and developers

Advice for designers and developers who are taking their first steps in investing.

December 16, 2019

Caching API routes with Next.js + Now

How I improved the loading time of our podcast network's API by 20x with one small configuration change.

December 8, 2019

Using Ghost as a headless CMS with Next.js

Rebuilding my self-hosted blog with Next.js and Ghost as a headless CMS.

December 8, 2019

Adding dark mode with Next.js, styled-components, and useDarkMode

How I added automatic dark mode to my personal site using Next.js, styled-components, and useDarkmode.

December 7, 2019

Migrating from Google Analytics to Fathom

Finally: a fast and simple, privacy-first analytics alternative to Google Analytics.

December 4, 2019