Al Abut

The Non-Designer's Design Book

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 22:33:00 GMT

I’m hosting this month’s edition of the IndieWeb Book Club. Thank you to Zachary Kai for getting this fun thing going with a kickoff post about The Creative Act, an artistic playbook by Rick Rubin, and to Joe Crawford for the November edition with an intro to Scott McCloud’s mind-expanding Understanding Comics.

My pick for this month’s book club is The Non-Designer’s Design Book by Robin Williams.

No, not that Robin Williams.

I’ve noticed that there’s a theme to the books we’ve picked so far for the club: they demystify artistic processes with the goal of making them approachable to a broader audience, deepening the appreciation of things you already enjoy like music, comics and the visual arts.

Each one goes from strategic and inspiring to more tactical and grounded, from Rubin’s near-mystical worship of the sacredness of creativity, to the tour through the history of visual communication by McCloud, to the immediately applicable tips of the Non-Designer book. Williams’ book being the most practical of the bunch makes sense given the business-like purpose of graphic design, but the theme of democratizing creativity is still strong through all of these books.

If the word “Design” with a capital D sounds intimidating to you - don’t be fooled! The basic principles aren’t carved into a stone tablet handed down from on high, it’s simply a way of seeing the world and a skill. And like any other skill, it can be improved with practice and a few starting tips.

It’s such a short read that it’s a bit of a stretch to call it a book. It’s like the skimmable Cliff Notes version instead of a dull textbook. But don’t be fooled - it packs a punch. It’s an impressively succinct distillation of design fundamentals that really helped me at the beginning of my career and still holds up well for anyone looking for an introduction.

It’s exactly the plain-speaking book that I needed back when I was a junior developer fresh out of college. I didn’t have any inkling that I’d become a designer one day, I simply wanted my work to look good. Over the years, I’ve met so many people who reminded me of those early days, people of all backgrounds and roles that aren’t necessarily looking to be designers by trade, but appreciate good layouts and want a few pointers to get there.

If that sounds like you, then this is the book I always recommend as a starting point. It takes the two main principles of graphic design - layout and typography - and distills them down to bite-sized walkthroughs and exercises. They’re much easier to master than you’d think and form the skeleton that everything else hangs on. Color, word choice, usability and all the rest come way later compared to these simple fundamentals.

So give it a spin and let me know how you like it! You can write up a blog post and send me a webmention, hit me up on the socials, or drop me an email, whatever works, and I’ll add links and quotes here.

Also check out the wiki page for the book club for more info or to sign up to host an upcoming month!

Organizing Photos

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 21:42:00 GMT

I’ve been thinking a lot about photographs lately and how to present them on my website. A few friends are too, each from different angles.

Jeremy is repatriating his photos from Instagram, while Tantek is exploring the idea of using Flickr as a CDN, and I’ve been expanding my approach to responsive images to also include RSS feed readers.

Tantek and Jeremy are going to be at IndieWebCamp in Berlin and it starts in just a few hours. I won’t be able to attend all of it remotely because of the time difference, so I’m going to pitch in with a few thoughts in advance.

I thought it would be helpful to take stock of what’s already out there and document common patterns with live examples. Here are the main ways I’ve seen people showcase their pics:

Notes
Photoessays
Albums

Plus a few ways that are less common but very intriguing, like Series and Stories.

Most Common Types

1. Photo notes are posts of a single image. Each picture is timestamped with its own URL.

Here’s some neat examples:

2. Photo essays are blog posts that have multiple images, alternating between pictures and a textual narrative that weaves it all together.

This is probably the most popular type. Winnie Lim has beautiful examples of photo essays that are travelogues documenting a trip, like this recent one to South Korea.

3. Photo albums are collections of multiple images, typically in a grid format with minimal or no text at the album level, optionally with a caption or more info at the individual photo level.

Naz Hamid recently added a Photos section to his site with a few starter albums, like this cool one of his New York trip.

Less Frequent Techniques

There’s a few other interesting ways to present images that I don’t see around as much but that are great food for thought.

Series:

Series are albums grouped together into a sequential set. Stammy does this at photos.paulstamatiou.com and they’re straight up gorgeous.

Looking at them again now, I can see why the idea stuck in my head. It’s such an obvious yet clever way of showing all the albums while grouping together the related ones.

I love how the series of three albums from his Africa trip not only have their own landing page, but also how the series sits directly below the album for Amsterdam and above the Caymans on the main photos page, all in a natural way that’s easy to distinguish.

So clean. None of the nonsense I usually see in Apple Photos about collections vs albums.

I’m definitely going to steal this idea for grouping together related albums, like when I have ton of photos from a big multi-night bicycling trip. In fact it might also be a great idea for grouping together blog posts of similar topics, like chapters in a book. Very thought-provoking.

Stories:

Stories are slideshows with a mixture of photos and short-form videos, as well as sometimes only text, usually in a vertical format. They can be the temporary kind that disappear after 24 hours or can stay up permanently.

Muan pioneered the concept of showing stories on the web and they have super fun examples on their home page.

What’s nice about this open web version of a story is that each photo or video in the slideshow has their own permalink, like this one of a bottle of maple syrup, which make them so frictionless to share. It’d be nice to also have a permalink for the larger story the photo is in so you could get the context, but it’s easy enough to browse their home page for more examples. And frankly it’s really fun to hop between stories.

Even more impressively, they also created a helpful spec for stories to encourage others to do the same. Joe Crawford used this same spec to create a “reels” section of his site for vertical videos and the related JSON feed.

There’s something really interesting about the format of vertical photos and videos that makes it especially relevant in the mobile era, even if it hasn’t broken out of Instagram jail yet and spread to the open web in large numbers. I tried to emulate a similar treatment by including both photos and vertical videos in my blog post about getting stuck in the mud on a training ride.

The disappearing kind has a bad reputation as engagement bait for addictive behaviors on Instagram and yes, there are real dangers of getting sucked into perfomative behavior that’s damaging for self-worth and mental health.

But I also find that there’s also a freedom to posting things that I know are temporary, one that paradoxically will often create things that are worth keeping. Making stories on Instagram lowers the activation energy for sharing things with friends in way that delays the curation and editing part of my brain. The effect is very similar to how posting a short thought on a microblogging platform is so easy and frictionless that it can seed good ideas for a larger blog post later.

These days I often find myself going through my stories archive to port over images and videos to other platforms for longer term sharing, so maybe I’ll give the stories format a try on my site one day.

Food For Thought

Looking back through this cross-section of sites, it triggered a few questions:

Can photos live in more than one place?
- For example, can a single picture be in both an album and a photoessay? Naz’s photo album of NYC links to the article about the same trip, and the article links back to the photo album. It’s like a two-way connection where the album and article are different views of the same photos, one visual, the other narrative.
Do albums have to be sorted by narrative or chronology?
- Or maybe they can be organized in other ways that cut across time, such as by topics. E.g. bicycles, landscapes, food, etc.
If photos live in albums, essays and categories, should a photo’s permalink include links to the different representations?
- Would it be helpful or distracting to have a slug with multiple links, saying something like: “As seen in this album and this article, under these topics”

This was fun to think about and I’m glad I documented the lay of the land, even if only for my own creative inspiration.

I’m curious to see what comes out of the jam sessions this weekend! Wishing good luck and safe travels to everyone attending this year.

Fun in the Mud

Thu, 23 Oct 2025 18:27:00 GMT

I got back into cycling a few years ago and then into bikepacking shortly after that, which is a type of off-grid camping for mountain bikers. It’s a fun activity with a lot to learn and I’ve been dialing new skills and gear.

Surprisingly, one of the parts that took the longest to figure out was which kind of front tire to use.

Front tire! That sounds like such a simple project but trust me, there’s a bewildering number of options to research and try out.

I went through three different types in as many years, racking up miles and punctures, riding all kinds of terrain to test the traction (and lack thereof), until I finally found my gamechanger: a bikepacking-specific model from the Japanese company SimWorks.

It strikes a difficult balance - it’s the biggest and knobbiest tire I could fit in my front fork, yet also somehow light and fast on the road.

This tire is awesome, I totally love it. It’s a gamechanger for grip in the corners and my confidence has skyrocketed in loose terrain, especially when carrying a heavy load of camping equipment.

I’m not a thrill-seeking action junkie, I’m a slow and steady type that’s only interested getting as far out in nature as I can, preferably with all of my limbs and gear intact.

But I’ve only been riding in dry conditions so far, which is why I got excited when it rained last week. Now was finally my chance to push my skills out to the extreme in slippery conditions and see where the outer limits really were, while still staying close to home and not in any real danger of getting stranded.

Also: I love the rain. Like to a weird degree. I made a big cup of coffee in the afternoon and just sat there, staring at it like a lunatic, waiting for my wife to come home from work so she could watch our anxious old dog.

So home she came and out I went.

And boy oh boy, that was fun. FUN.

I was grinning from ear-to-ear while getting soaked and charging through puddles. I had to watch it in corners a little bit but that was nothing compared to my old setup. I would’ve spun in circles like Bambi on ice.

It was so capable that I got into a totally different kind of trouble than what I expected. I didn’t crash, instead I was out in the wet slick stuff so much that I hit a patch of “peanut butter mud” and got stopped dead in my tracks.

This nasty stuff is what mountain bikers dread, but totally new to me. I’ve only read about the stuff in recaps of hardcore endurance racing.

Honestly this stuff is so gross. It gums everything up so much that the tires can’t spin at all. It’s a dense mixture of fine-grained soil and wet clay that sticks in giant clumps, growing larger with every rotation until you’re trapped in place like a mastodon in a tar pit.

In fact it was so thick that it popped the belt right off the drive, which almost never happens.

I use a bike with a belt instead of a chain for increased durability in all conditions. It doesn’t need lubing, cleaning or maintenance, and normally it sheds rain and mud off like water off of a duck’s back, but even this amazing piece of tech has its limits. It’s only come off 1-2 times before ever.

This kind of mud is no joke for bikepackers. Run into it in a remote place and boom, game over. You better have a satellite device to call in a rescue.

But let’s not get carried away. I’m not James Franco in 127 Hours. I could’ve walked home if I really had to.

Frankly, I was having way too much fun learning new skills to be grumpy. It being a test run near home made all the difference in my mood and I laughed off the whole thing in disbelief.

So, there was nothing to do but schlep it out. I did what we call a “hike and bike” - I picked the bike up, slung it over a shoulder, and trudged my way off the trail. I found a loading dock by the lake and propped it up on a table for a field repair.

Then it was time to dig in and clean the crap off of it, one disgusting chunk at a time, until things were in good enough working order again.

Finally, it was clean enough to reassemble the belt and wheel setup, then ride home.

I came home with the biggest smile on my face. Honestly that was such a blast that I felt like a little kid splashing in puddles on purpose.

The next day, I proudly took pics of the aftermath.

I love seeing my bike in a filthy state, hinting at the previous night’s adventures. It puts a wry smile on my face, like whenever I see a muddy old Land Rover parked in a monotonous sea of spotless SUVs that have never left the pavement.

I learned a lot on that ride: seeing how the tire held up, practicing control in tricky conditions, and successfully getting out of a literal sticky situation.

I also learned that there are a few more upgrades I need before tackling bad weather in isolated areas, like hydromechanical brakes designed to handle mud like this without fading. The cheapo stock hydraulics failed for the second time this year and I screwed up something in the rear one in particular, so now it’s spongy and borderline useless.

But even without those tweaks, I’m steadily growing in confidence that I can handle some bigger adventures, the kind I’ve been daydreaming about ever since getting into this hobby.

I already had a pretty big ride earlier this year to the local mountains and back, an incredible and demanding experience that I really should sit down and write up.

That was still mostly pavement though. My next big challenge is going to be my biggest off-grid test yet. There’s an event in Laguna Beach in about a month, an epic one where the shortest option is 38 miles of chunky difficult landscape, longer than I’ve ever gone off-road before.

Who knows what the trail conditions will be like in mid-November? It’ll probably be dry enough for some Type 2 fun. Or maybe it’ll get wet and I’ll be hating life in a Type 3 sufferfest.

Either way, I’m down for more adventures and hard lessons. Sometimes the worst ideas make the best stories.

Shelter Island

Sun, 12 Oct 2025 07:59:00 GMT

San Diego’s been unseasonably muggy and warm lately, so yesterday our little family went to my favorite place to cool off. My wife and I grabbed our dog Dudley, hopped in the car and headed to a hidden gem in the middle of the city.

Shelter Island was one of my favorite escapes when we lived nearby on the coast. Great views, nice breeze, and most importantly for us locals, no tourists, bar hoppers or beach crowds.

Luckily it’s just a quick 20 minute drive from our new neighborhood, with no traffic even on a gorgeous Saturday. You gotta love warm weather towns after summer break.

We all needed this. Dudley hasn’t been himself lately and these last few months have been an adjustment to his senior years. We were long overdue for a pick-me-up.

I used to love walking around Shelter Island with Dudley and we hadn’t done it in ages, so it was worth a shot to see if he’d perk up.

And it worked! Maybe he remembered our countless walks, or maybe he just enjoyed the short walk and fresh grass. Either way, it seemed to do the trick. His usual jittery nerves smoothed out and the whole gang settled on a blanket to relax.

When my little guy is happy, I’m happy. The old cliché “happy wife, happy life” is one of my mantras and now I’ve added “happy little dog, happy big dog.”

It’s funny to write a tribute about something as simple as sitting with a calm dog, watching harbor traffic.

This past year since we moved has been a whirlwind. I love the new hood and don’t regret the move. I’ve had a blast exploring new trails on my bike and there’s always at least one monthly group ride to look forward to.

But it’s felt like a hamster wheel at times and I forgot how vital it is to recharge with stillness, not just energy and motion. You have to mix up the usual routines sometimes with something chill and serene. Peaceful even.

I honestly can’t remember the last quiet outing like this, the kind where I remember to bring my small point and shoot camera. It feels fantastic to put the phone away, look up, and be present in the moment.

Boats drifting, a fresh sea breeze, my sweet dog chilling next to us… Yesterday was a nice day, a slow perfect afternoon before the season turns and it’s proper fall weather again.

And a good reminder to take a step back and enjoy the simple things.

Cosplaying as an Influencer

Wed, 06 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT

I took a picture of my neighbor last year while practicing my portrait photography with an old camera. His favorite coffee brand saw my post on Instagram and sent a bunch of beans and other gifts as a thank you.

It was such a nice little surprise! I’m not someone that has a huge following on social media and I only post my photos as a way to practice photography, so I was pleased as punch that sharing his story would be appreciated, since he’s someone that’s been so generous with advice and gear to encourage me to get back into bicycling after many years away.

Here’s the photos and writeup from November of 2023:

Let me tell you a little bit about my neighbor Randy:

He’s one of two friends that got me back into cycling. I figured if a guy in his 70’s can ride MTB, road and fixies even though he’s got shrapnel in one of lungs from Vietnam (and by the way he still totally shreds, riding his fixie up the steep hill at Washington Street to lift at Stern’s Gym, the oldest gym in the country) well then hey, I can power through a knee injury and stop making excuses.

He used to coach a youth velodrome team back in the 90’s, a little bit after I did a season there in 8th grade, another connection to my formative years that makes me feel like I really am back home. It warms heart to see that the velodrome is still going stronger than ever – it’s a meetup spot for all kinds of group rides and is the beating heart of the central urban San Diego cycling scene.

And yes he’s still pushing the envelope. I mean just look at his shirt of the world’s strongest coffee, that stuff is industrial grade jet fuel.

In short, I want to be Randy when I grow up. I told his wife that once and she said “yep, he gets that a lot” 😂

So here’s to rad old dudes that fight Father Time like a boss. That’s the battle I’m going to be training for sooner than you think and I hope to handle myself at least half as well 💪

The brand I referenced in the post is Death Wish Coffee, a company with the punk-sounding tagline “Rebellious by Nature” — an appropriately irreverent and hard core culture that’s a perfect fit for coffee-loving athletic types.

Hell, their coffee’s even been to the space station, not just once but twice.

Bad. Ass.

After seeing my writeup, they sent a thoughtful hand-written note of appreciation and a bunch of beans, stickers, a mug and cool bandana:

It’s such a fitting gift for a coffee fan like Randy. His morning routine is to walk his bulldog Molly while carrying a ceramic espresso cup, slowly ambling their way to the coffee shack down the block for an early pick me up. I got him a gift card from the same place about a year ago and this just levels it up even more.

Randy = Cycling Enabler

We started talking not soon after I moved to the area because I saw a track bike on his roof rack, which is how I learned about his involvement with the local velodrome.

Bicycling played a huge part in my adolescent years. The junior team at the local track was one of those “I found my tribe” moments in life, formative in ways that you appreciate even more in hindsight.

I lost touch with cycling many years ago, after injuring my knee playing soccer and needing surgery. So when I got back into it after such a long time away, I naturally had a lot of growing pains and minor issues. I took it slowly, taking any advice and tweaks to my gear that I could get.

Randy gave me a couple of different saddles to try out and see what my fit was. And once that was dialed in but I was still experiencing wrist pain, he even gave wrist guards specific to riding mountain bikes, from a motocross brand that doesn’t even make them anymore. So incredibly generous and a total lifesaver.

So here’s to capturing moments, celebrating our neighbors, and of course, to more epic cups of coffee. Ride on, Randy, and thanks for the beans, Death Wish Coffee.

Rebuilding Digital Relationships

Thu, 29 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT

It’s funny how what’s old can be new again.

When I was thinking about the topic of digital relationships, I thought of a funny juxtaposition. The rest of the world seems to be catching up to how techies have communicated for decades. And in return, the way regular civilians are using tech are helping techies to humanize their own circles.

There’s an interesting boomerang of communication tools and patterns between two usually distinct cultures: nerds and normies.

The Great Flip

It seems like ages ago that my work involved going into an office and collaborating with people in real life. I’ve been working from home on fully distributed remote-only teams since the pandemic started. A handful of years later and this is all the new normal. The routines feel like muscle memory.

The omnipresent thrumming of Slack, Zoom and gCal has replaced the footsteps and voices in the hall between conference rooms. Focused alone time with Figma now comes with snoring little dogs as a soundtrack, instead of whatever loud repetitive techno I needed to block out idle chatter from coworkers.

When I step back to compare working life in both scenarios, it’s easy to see a flip in the ratios of interaction types:

Pre-pandemic, at least 90% of my most important communication and collaboration was face-to-face, with the digital tools filling in the last 10% as a sort of glue.
Now it’s the other way around, working on teams where digital tools take at least 90% of the interactions and there might be an occasional 5-10% of real life component that acts as a social mortar between the bricks of work.

What occurred to me only recently is how much the latter feels exactly like how I made friends in the early days of my career.

Back during the heyday of blogging, user groups and the explosion of both the commercial and non-commercial web, you’d follow plenty of people online and get to know them through their writing, forums, mailing lists and the like. Then occasionally you’d be lucky enough to meet them in person at a local meeting or big industry conference. Then it’s back to the digital spaces to the maintain and deepen those relationships.

Digital relationships that were 90% online, with a crucial 10% in person.

Now, it’s like a good chunk of the world took an intensive course on online communication in the last 4+ years and decided that well what do you know? Those geeks were on to something.

I’m glad they came around.

I’m not saying remote work is perfect but holy hell did I use to daydream about the kinds of focus and convenience that I take for granted now. I spent 15 years riding the San Francisco startup rollercoaster and loved it immensely, but it used to kill me that so much of my work there was so inefficient. It got harder and harder to ignore the irony of creating tools and services to help people around the world run their businesses, all while crammed together like a pool of typing secretaries from Mad Men.

Open office = productivity nightmare

But once Zoom became as ubiquitous as email for our daily work, the change didn’t stop there. It ricocheted right through the office and back into our social spaces, exactly like the way geeks used tech to blur the lines between work and play.

Normies started Zooming for fun. They took the digital relationship-making tools from work out into their private spaces.

Zoomies

Just before the pandemic started, I reconnected with a theater buddy from my college years that now works in entertainment in LA. He welcomed me into his circle of other theater geeks and movie buffs and we all fought the cabin fever of the lockdowns together. We did weekly Zoom parties to watch TV and movies, staying up late for premieres of shows like Wandavision and The Mandalorian. In between seasons, we did an epic full rewatch of the entire MCU movie library. Plus there were the occasional game nights too.

All that time spent together turned into ongoing digital relationships to this day. The friends-of-friends eventually became my friends too as we all got to know each other’s quirks, interests and senses of humor. I followed along with their podcasts and even made a few guest appearances, first with a Q&A interview and then in a group panel about Dune.

In fact I’m hoping we can do another Dune show again before the next movie. I read all seven of the books in the original arc and totally loved them.

Those digital relationships bled over into the real world too, as we got annual passes to Disneyland (a great spot to practice photography) and went to movie premieres.

This would’ve sounded so far-fetched before. We even had complicated words for it like “video teleconference” that sounded about as inviting as an accountant’s convention. The idea that you’d try to use a complicated enterprise app like Webex just to say hi to a few friends sounds like a setup for one of those old Mac vs PC ads. I can almost picture John Hodgman doing a bit about how piecharts and spreadsheets can capture the essence of a family vacation on a tropical isle.

Now all that has been brushed away. My elderly mom uses Zoom to sit in on painting classes at the local community college and never once needed to ask for my help in getting set up.

My mom’s an artist and a life-long learner. She’s taken art classes for decades. Her friend circle is almost exclusively through these meaningful connections.

Now I wouldn’t be surprised if 90% of her interactions are through Zoom. Whether it’s taking a guitar class, getting a guided tour through a museum, learning a new illustration style or what have you, these digital relationships are as real as any other she’s had.

Full Circle

And here’s the kicker, the last boomerang.

Once people started using these tools in this way and normalized the use of work apps for social occasions, that fun spirit worked it’s way back to exactly the same types of tinkering web creatives that made me first fall in love with tech in the first place.

The Homebrew Website Club was my first gateway drug to the larger IndieWeb community and is still my favorite part of it. Meeting new people regularly over Zoom and even occasionally locally is the crucial 10% that humanizes all of the remaining 90%. Busy IRC chats, immensely comprehensive wikis, active Mastodon conversations, following each other’s blogs… it all feels like the 90’s and early 2000’s again.

What I love most about that is that I didn’t realize how much of that maker’s spirit was missing in my life, how much the intrinsic fuel of personal web sandboxes was getting used up at work, until these communities became a regular part of my social life the last few months.

I stopped going to user groups ages ago. Understandably so – I got sucked into the hamster wheel of startups, first as an early employee and then a founder. It’s draining for the same reason it’s so exciting: it takes everything you have. Being entrepreneurial is a double-edged sword in that way. Every hard skill, soft network connection and drop of energy gets fed into the machine.

This is getting a bit confessional, but I just didn’t make time for the kinds of friendships that got me into this racket in the first place. The in-person nature of meeting up felt like too big a commitment. If there was a choice between an industry event or unplugging completely from the tech scene, I chose the latter almost every time, for years in a row.

Until digital relationships outside of work became as fun and easy as firing up a Zoom. That’s the boomerang that I’m grateful for.

Speaking of IndieWeb…

This post is my first time making an entry for the IndieWeb Carnival, a monthly writing prompt for bloggers and online creators. February’s topic is “Digital Relationships” and is hosted by Manuel Moreale - read his kickoff post here.

Housecleaning Jams

Mon, 26 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Here’s some random inspiration for your week. I was doing dishes while listening to this hard German techno set:

I love this kind of stuff, almost too much. Makes me feel like I just popped the drug from the movie Limitless.

Then I wondered what my IndieWeb buddies put on when they need to get motivated, so I pinged the chat room and this is what came back:

Alternative

Gregor says: “Depends on the mood, usually something synthpop or electronic rock. The Naked and Famous’ Passive Me, Aggressive You is a staple.”

Apple Music | YouTube | Spotify

Jazz

Kevin says: “I play really old school jaz when I am doing a big tidy up.”

Apple Music | YouTube | Spotify: Vol 1, Vol 2, Vol 3

Pop

James picked Taylor Swift and Tantek asked our friendly bot Loqi to decide between 1989or Midnights. 1989 won. The A.I. overlords have spoken. And listened, apparently.

Apple Music | YouTube | Spotify

Now it’s your turn

What about you? What kind of music puts you in the mood to tidy up? Drop me a line about a song or album you like and why.

Happy cleaning!

Reply via email or Mastodon.

Advice About Advice

Wed, 07 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT

The shortest piece of career advice I can give is about what not to do:

“Never listen to people who haven’t done what you’re trying to do.”

And you probably shouldn’t listen to them if they’re successful either.

Human beings are fantastic storytellers and terrible at determining actual causality. Or maybe they’re a product of their time and unique circumstances.

Whatever the reason, most advice isn’t nearly as directly applicable as you think. You can’t always shortcut the path to learning your own lessons.

None of this is a hard and fast law, and it’s not a case for solipsism. Don’t plug your ears, of course you should listen to other people. It’s just a guiding principle that can help you listen to your own internal compass if you ever find yourself getting distracted or demoralized.

Don’t spin your wheels because of external chatter. Not everything has catastrophic consequences. Go, do your thing. Then later, stop and reflect.

Learn by doing. You’re not going to climb a mountain just by reading about Everest.

The more nuanced version is to realize the underlying story of where people are coming from and look for more generalized patterns. I’m paraphrasing Paul Bucheit, the creator of Gmail, who said something along the lines of:

“Most people’s advice is just their own experiences.”

I interpret that to mean you should take a giant grain of salt and contextualize what people are saying, to see if it still applies to you and your challenges.

That’s what’s worked for me.

But that’s just me. If you’re really getting the message on a meta level… then you definitely don’t have to listen to me about any of this either 😉

This started out as a comment on a LinkedIn post - What’s the shortest career advice you can give? - and there’s a lot of other great answers there as well.

Lunch At Five Guys

Wed, 31 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Yesterday I had burgers and fries with these two gentlemen:

Gregor and Joe were kind enough to head to my neck of the woods for a mid-week break and I enjoyed it immensely. We talked for well over two hours and covered all kinds of ground with candor and humor.

Careers, writing, online origin stories, mid-life hurdles… it was all fair game. The conversation was refreshing and much-needed.

We ended on an interesting note that I’d like to explore more in-depth in a future post: the different journeys we each took until we ended up getting involved in the Homebrew Website Club, a friendly social group that meets about every two weeks over zoom to encourage each other with our personal projects.

I say future because oof am I beat today and just hitting publish on this is a minor victory.

Just Keep Swimming

This week’s post is a short one just to keep the weekly cadence going. Sometimes the writing just flows like it did last week, where I had the bare bones written out about 5 days early and even had enough time to send a draft around for feedback. I spent days adding and swapping out the photos, the layout, captions, getting everything just right.

And then there are weeks like this one, where life gets in the way and is draining on every level, so it’s a win just to pop something up an hour before my self-imposed Wednesday deadline expires.

I’ll take the base hit this time, it’s cool. As Joe likes to say: Onward

Reply via email or Mastodon.

Hello World

Wed, 24 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Doing a proper introduction

A New Year, A New Blog

Tue, 16 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

I’m kicking off a new challenge — blogging weekly in the first quarter of 2024, through the end of March. It’s been ages since I wrote regularly on my own website, so I’m excited to kick off a new chapter and hope you’ll follow along.

Welcome to my first post in over two years!

Bending The Rules

Wait, didn’t I say every week of Q1 2024? And aren’t we in the third week of January?

That’s right, I’m getting a late start on my own writing challenge. Busted.

However, since I also happen to be the referee in this little game that I’ve set up for myself, I’m going to interpret the rules generously: everything I did this month counts as publishing. Because I definitely wasn’t sitting on the sidelines.

The last two weeks were chock full of invisible and unglamorous prep work:

Week 1 — I finished the transition of my hand-coded site to Astro, a static site generator, and put up a writing archive with about a dozen posts from 2019-2021, my last spate of writing.
Week 2 — I created the RSS feed.

But enough about the technical underpinnings for now. I’ll dive into more details some other time about why I chose Astro and how I set it up.

What’s more important than the how is the why.

Why Am I Blogging Again?

The short answer: I blame my old friend Joe Crawford. And a few of his new friends he introduced me to, a small tribe of people that call themselves the IndieWeb.

The longer answer: well that’s also for another time.

Sorry for the teaser but I just need to get this first “hello world” out of my head. I’ve written and rewritten this so many freaking times that I’ve already queued up a nice healthy backlog of 4-5 separate topics. Clearly I need to practice the cadence of writing regularly again.

It’s a much longer story to recap how 2023 and the decentralized social web rekindled the flame of intrinsic motivation in a way that acted as a form of burnout recovery. It’s a topic that I bet other people can relate to and deserves its own space to breathe.

So tonight, I’m going to leave it here, keep it fun and light, and go celebrate this relaunch with my IndieWeb buds at our biweekly hangout, The Homebrew Website Club.

See You Next Week

I hope you’ll come along for the ride! Grab that RSS feed that I worked so hard on or follow along with one of the social sites in my bio below. And thank you for reading!

Diving Into Dune

Mon, 06 Sep 2021 00:00:00 GMT

I'm really excited about the Dune movie coming out next month. I have a hunch that I'm going to love it, based on how much I'm enjoying reading the books right now.

It also helps that I'm already an unreserved fan of the director, Denis Villeneuve, and all of his movies I've seen so far - Sicario, Arrival, and Blade Runner 2049. He's got the perfect approach for this type of material and makes the kind of films that I make me want to go the movies in the first place, the ones that work best on the largest IMAX screen you can find and take their time to let the experience wash over you.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/8g18jFHCLXk

It's a courageous decision to take on a story so dense and wide-reaching that it was long considered unfilmable. The documentary Jodorowsky's Dune chronicles a legendary Hollywood project that failed in spectacular fashion, despite having raised almost $10 million and corraled an incredibly talented group of people with ambitious ideas.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/m0cJNR8HEw0

Jodorowsky's version of the film is arguably the most famous movie to never get made. In an interesting bit of karma, the efforts did not go to waste. The extensive writing, art and storyboards went on to directly inspire the production of Star Wars, Alien, Terminator and The Fifth Element, with some of the movies even sharing the same original team members.

Reading The Novels

Yet despite all of this hype, the Dune books were a major hole in my sci-fi game until now. I'm not entirely sure why; you'd think that a techie nerd that was a voracious reader all through childhood would've discovered at least the first book, since it's widely considered to be the best novel of it's type.

Maybe it's because I'd grown up as a massive fan of Isaac Asimov instead? His work is more of the typical futuristic stuff with robots and computers. Or maybe it's a generational thing - I grew up with Star Wars, which I now realize is like the kiddie version of Dune.

Whatever the reason, I finally dove into the novels a few weeks ago and boy am I glad I did. I've read the first 3 of the 6 and the trilogy is simply stunning.

Finally filling in a major hole in my sci-fi game. Huge thanks to my wife for insisting that we read the books before Dune comes out in October. pic.twitter.com/BTqdw21YMc
— Al Abut (@alabut) August 24, 2021

I'm a stickler for avoiding spoilers, so here's a high-level rundown of a few things I've noticed so far.

It really is Star Wars for grownups. But I'm also seeing it reflected in so many other parts of culture - Neo becoming a blind martyr in The Matrix, the polarized siblings in Shang-Chi trying to save the soul of their father, etc.
There's a strong subversion of the hero myth. It examines familiar tropes in a very self-aware way and then goes in very different directions, especially after the first book.
The world-building is on epic scale and quite literal: ecology and environment are front and center. I can see why it first got popular from being recommended in The Whole Earth Catalog. It reminds me of work like “cli-fi” author Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140, a near future take on how rising sea levels impact all levels of society in unexpected ways.
It's the first interesting take on religion that I've read in ages. The central premise is an observation that at least three of our major religions were born in the desert, so there might be a formative impact of difficult environments on the culture and beliefs of a people. Hard times create hard people that create good times for everyone else that follows. Stoicism writ large.
It's sci-fi that doesn't feel like sci-fi. Dune seems like it was written as an intentional counterpoint to Isaac Asimov's Foundation. They both start from a similar premise about decaying empires and takes it to very different directions.
This is a weird one but I can't help but think that the spice drug is caffeine! Michael Pollan makes a convincing case that the world's most popular psychoactive drug (it's consumed by 90% of the planet) is what helped kickstart the Industrial Age.

At this point, I'm totally engrossed in this universe and the movie is going to be a bonus. I just started the fourth book - God Emperor of Dune - and can't wait to see where this goes.

Feeling Inspired at Disneyland

Tue, 31 Aug 2021 00:00:00 GMT

On Sunday, I did something that I’ve daydreamed about for a long while now — I got an annual pass to Disneyland. After 15 years of living in SF, it’s one of the perks of moving back to So Cal that I most looked forward to and finally got to indulge now that I’m back.

It’s not an idea that’s always been with me, it’s something that germinated small a few years back and grew to the point that I was truly looking forward to making it happen. If I had to point to a single origin on my timeline, I’d guess that it was after finding out that Steve Jobs idolized Walt Disney and I read both of their biographies to find out why.

I was blown away to find out that Walt was much more than a friendly avuncular animator, in ways that are too expansive to get into right now. Let’s just say that my visits to Disneyland always spark some of that same inspiration I felt when first learning about him or visiting the Walt Disney Family Museum devoted to his life story.

Aside from the ties to Walt, it’s still hard to articulate exactly why becoming an annual pass holder appeals to me so much. All I know is that I get a lot out of every visit. Maybe it’s the pleasant nostalgia, meeting up with friends with similar interests, or a variety of other underlying reasons.

Pics

Another factor is that it’s a great little laboratory to experiment with my new camera and practice photography. There’s something so soothing about walking around with your head in the clouds, music playing in the AirPods while looking for angles and light. I consider my skills to be intermediate but enjoy the process of hunting and trying.

I’m looking forward to seeing how the park changes with the seasons and trying to capture the different vibes over the next 12 months. The changes for the fall are already here: the Haunted Mansion was down while they theme it with Nightmare Before Xmas, while orange banners and pumpkins adorned Main Street.

Here’s a few from this weekend:

If you liked these and want to see more, here’s a collection of photos from the first half of this year.

Thoughts on Taste

Tue, 24 Aug 2021 00:00:00 GMT

“The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste.”— Steve Jobs on the PBS series, Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires
It’s amazing how many years have passed in the fast-moving industry of technology, but some trends never seem to die. Companies and people still seem to fall into 2 main camps: the originators and the imitators. Those that do the hard work of figuring out what people want, and the rest that look over their shoulders copying their work.
It’s not easy being an originator, at least not when you’re truly on to something instead of just a “spray and pray” random approach. I remember hearing a phrase once that captured it well, something along the lines of “the one blazing the trail has the most arrows in their back.”
It’s just so much easier being a follower that sometimes it makes my blood boil. I have the same visceral reaction about Google today that SJ felt about Microsoft years ago —they have an institutional absence of perspective and judgement when it comes to new products and initiatives.
Oh sure, they’ve gotten better at refining the upper most layers of a product or service. To put it in the arcane jargon of software design —they’ve improved their UI skills but don’t mistake that for competent UX. The offending disease is even worse when you go a layer down and find that they completely lack that ineffable horse sense about what it takes to make a good product.
If this seems like painting with too broad a brushstroke, it’s inherent to their system. They’re fast followers and incremental improvers, not originators.
They’re not alone, there’s an entire ecosystem for that approach. Marc Benioff proudly described Salesforce as a fast follower, keeping a pulse on which consumer trends were worth copying into the business world.
But I know who I’d rather be, what kind of challenges inspire me, and how important it is to live an authentic life.
Let’s close on another zinger from Jobs that came years later:
“Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything, which is why I think he's more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology. He just shamelessly ripped off other people's ideas.”
I may not have liked him as a person or approved of all of his life choices, but I simply adore that Steve held grudges so passionately, even after his arch nemesis had settled into retirement and created a softer public persona.
As I sit here in middle age, rocketing towards my eventual senility, I can already tell that I'm going to be a similarly grouchy old man. And I'm already totally cool with it.

The Long Tail, Revisited

Mon, 16 Aug 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Recently, some friends were lamenting about how there were more good TV shows than could possibly be watched when I made a reference to an old theory about popularity called The Long Tail. Since they weren’t familiar with it, it was an interesting excuse to dig it back up and explain it in a way where I could examine whether it still holds up.

The Initial Theory

The long tail was coined by the editor of Wired in an article back in 2004. Essentially the idea was that there wouldn’t really be any more hits (clustered towards the head of a graph of sales or popularity) and instead everyone would fall down the rabbit hole of endlessly customizing their own unique tastes (spread out over a long tail of the graph).

Source

The first big wins like this were Netflix’s DVD sales or Amazon’s book sales. After all it didn’t matter to the bottom line if you sold 10 copies of a hit or 10 different copies of more obscure stuff, a dollar was a dollar no matter what.

The Reality

So fast forward a decade and a half. How did it work out?

The long term truth ended up being a little more complicated. The hits are bigger than ever before because people get overwhelmed by choice and it’s that much harder to stand out now.

That’s how we ended up in this era of “peak TV”: there’s way too much stuff out there to watch and yet also at the same time there are huge hits like Loki for Disney, Tiger King for Netflix, etc. There always seems to be at least one series having their moment in the mainstream spotlight, despite the fragmented nature of collective audiences and our individual attention.

So life is good for Beyoncé, not so much for the average musician, even though it’s easier than ever to make music. Same for film and other media.

Looking Ahead

But all is not lost. There are alternative ideas that are more nuanced and just as old, like the concept of only needing 1,000 true fans. Way back in the pre-Kickstarter era of 2008, Jason Kottke wrote that artists and businesses don’t have to be famous in an old school way to millions that sort of like you, you can instead carve out a different path. Find a smaller tribe of super fans that love you tons and will consistently support you.

It’s what appealed to me about Patreon and a few other gigs when I dug into entertainment tech as an area while I was job hunting. I couldn’t find anything that was as good a fit as the job I started a few months ago (exploring AR in the construction industry) so I put the area on my backburner and decided to just keep an eye out on the space instead.

I’m still rooting from the sidelines for positive progress. I really want artists and small companies to have tools to make their work more sustainable.

Change Before You Have To

Mon, 02 Aug 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric, liked to think about change. I'm sure he meant purely in business terms but maybe it applies to personal life too.

"When growth is constant the structural problems are hidden.

When disruption happens, change is unavoidable."

— Jack Welsh

There's something that appeals to me about intentionally making things uncomfortable, especially where I'm at with my own personal growth. It's my current mental challenge to become comfortable with uncomfortable thoughts and feelings.

Maybe change is growth when you expect it and disruption when you don't?

Changing My Mornings

Just this past Friday, I was irritable in a morning meeting and in hindsight, it was because I was uncomfortable.

It was natural to feel that way in our first meaningful design review. If I'd just been more patient with those feelings however, then I could've asked clarification questions and seen that there was no misalignment. We were all on the same page all along.

Also I was very hungry and un-caffeinated. That's never good at work.

So I'm going to start a few small changes: preparing cold snacks and coffee the night before I have early morning meetings, and asking clarification questions when feeling irritated.

So that's my takeaway: start with small steps and don't wait for a sign.

What about you, dear reader? What small changes can you make? And if you're waiting for a more obvious sign in your own life before feeling the need to change, then here you go:

This is the sign you've been waiting for...

Space Exploration Is Important

Tue, 27 Jul 2021 00:00:00 GMT

“No hot water, no toilets, no lights. But Whitey’s on the moon.” — Gil Scott-Heron, 1970

This all started with a passionate defence of The Expanse on Facebook, before spiraling out into Lovecraft Country and ultimately the roots of the space program itself.

A few friends had mentioned that although they’re fans of The Expanse, it took a few tries to slog through the first season before it clicked for them.

I was agog. How could anyone not be hooked from the very first moment? Maybe I was so taken in by the world-building that I ignored some other weaker aspects?

It’s possible. I was also instantly taken in by Raised By Wolves, except I can’t think of any weak points there. The lead actress in particular put on an absolute clinic while she crushed the shit out of that role. Crushed.

Space Race, Take Three

Maybe art takes on different meanings depending on what you bring to it, like if you’ve been following the impact of technology on society throughout your entire life.

I mean, does anyone else wonder what the real world implications are of SpaceX’s rush to Mars colony and Blue Origin’s to asteroid mining? That’s not to mention the hundreds (thousands?) of little space startups excitedly watching from the sidelines as those two titans battle it out to build the infrastructure deeper into space, like they already did for low earth orbit.

It’s like we’re watching the railroads to the Pacific being built out in real time, one youtube stream at a time.

It’s utterly fascinating. That same history warns us of our own potential for abuse. But hang on, I’ll come back to that in the last section.

And it’s not just SpaceX and Blue Origin that’s finding profitable ways to venture out into the vacuum, they’re just the tip of the iceberg. The little startup space companies following in their wake aren’t hypothetical and in the future, they exist right now in the current day.

For example, just to pick one crazy-sounding one: there’s an entire class of company that doesn’t own any rockets or control their payload, they simply make satellites with tons of little satellites within them, like russian dolls. They don’t even make the mini satellites, just send them up.

They’re called cubesats. When you think satellite, you think of something the size of a car. Nope. They’re so small that they’re about the size of a Rubik’s Cube. Hence the cube in cubesats.

There’s so many of these things that 1 in 5 violate international orbit disposal guidelines. It’s the new space trash.

Friend of mine worked at one such cubesat company and did very well. Now he’s an investor somewhere.

Cubesats aren’t made by just one company. They’re their own ecosystem within the larger ecosystem. Sort of like wifi routers — there are many brands and makers of essentially the same specs.

There’s another company that does make their own mini satellites but no idea who uses them because they rent out time on their sensors by the second. E.g. a satelitte’s end user for a few minutes could be some government snooping over military bases and then seconds later it’s a commercial fishery monitoring the open water.

And that’s just low earth orbit, in very broad strokes.

What do you think this entire ecosystem of the space industry will do with a permanent moon base? Which is just a gas station on the way to Mars and deeper, which themselves are waypoints to… etc.

The more you get into these companies, the more real this stuff is to them. A friend that applied to Blue Origin talks in ways that completely blur the lines between sci-fi and reality.

And that’s just the commercial side of things. NASA’s conversations about the Mars colony setting up proper governance, education, and culture are very real and very, very needed, given the track record of exploitation the companies already have on earth.

My casual armchair quarterback guess is that our solar system will start looking like The Expanse within my lifetime.

Long haul truckers will be bringing in precious minerals from asteroids to be processed on the way to Mars or Earth. It’ll be as routine as SpaceX’s rockets landing back on their launch pads are today. And the companies will fight as hard against the unionization of these astronauts as they do against their workers back on our home planet.

So yeah, I think The Expanse is a good show. Does that begin to explain why? 😂

Getting To The Real Questions

A slightly heavier take is that we have to care about space exploration because it’s going to happen and ignoring it means exploitation will run rampant to new horrifying heights. No one will be there to check corporate greed.

That’s why everyone against it is asking the wrong question.

It’s not: should we go into space? No, this isn’t tax-payer funded and dependent on our approval. It’s not even military-driven like the early space race. This time, the private industry is in the driver’s seat and has its own momentum now. We’re already going.

We are going into space and the right question is who do we want to be as we go? Star Trek’s utopia? Or the Star Wars hellscape. Which universe would you prefer?

I’ll give you a hint about which team I’m on. Elon went to the Air Force Academy and said he wants a Starfleet. I’m guessing that’s Bezos’ worst nightmare, having to answer to a bunch of uppity entitled cadets.

Then again, Branson is playing the clever fool and disguised as a non-factor, written off as just the party guy cheering on the main players. He may be the dark horse in this race.

But even those white guys give me massive amounts of pause. They look too much like the colonizers from previous centuries, writ large. I don’t see myself in them as much as I do when I watch a Black space goddess from the future in Lovecraft Country.

Hippolyta meets Seraphina

So the punchline is: we have to care, otherwise we export our exploitation to a rampant level throughout the solar system.

Riding The Rocket Of My Dreams

Ultimately the person I’m trying to convince is myself. Underneath all this is a tone poem about diversity in real life making room for my own imagination.

I’ll probably never physically go to space in my lifetime, yet my mind wanders. The more types of people see themselves in space, the more I see myself, even if none of them look like me.

And if the only people that care about space are the ones that look like the guys funding the trip, then we all lose.

An artistic depiction of Afrofuturism by Solen Feyissa

Racism in Soccer

Mon, 12 Jul 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Yesterday I watched a thrilling soccer game between England and Italy in the final match of the 2020 Euro Cup. Today I woke up to news articles that jolted me back 31 years to the first time I encountered the ugly side of the game.

Euro 2020

First a bit of context: the Euro Cup is a big deal. It’s part of a trifecta of tournaments to find the best national team, the others being the Copa America in South America and of course the World Cup.

This year’s finalists were young teams that progressed much farther than almost anyone expected, given the other powerhouses involved. The final game went on for over two hours and then finally went to penalties to decide a winner.

When the dust settled, Italy won.

Italy winning wasn’t the problem, it’s how England lost. Both of the white players scored their penalties whereas all three black ones missed, including a precociously young 19-year-old for the literal last kick of the game.

You can see where this is going.

Within 30 minutes of the final whistle, the normally disgusting background levels of racist abuse went into fullblown overdrive, weaponized by the darker corners of the internet and bursting out into the daylight of regular consumer social media for all to see.

“When you win, you’re English. When you lose, you’re Black.” — Medical researcher Ahmed Ali

It bled over into the real world as well. One of their star players had his mural defaced by hateful cowards.

If that sounds small, the target was huge. The mural was of Marcus Rashford, a young man who will undoubtedly be knighted one day for his work to end child hunger and illiteracy. He started a campaign to feed 400,000 children during COVID in his local area that ended up vastly exceeding goals, feeding 4 million throughout the country instead. All while also changing official U.K. government policy that had caused the crisis in the first place, as well as recovering from a double stress fracture in his back to regain his place at his club team.

As if that wasn’t enough, Rashford ramped up his sights from ending hunger during school breaks to tackling illiteracy. He is truly a fully-fledged national hero.

Yet after all this, one miss in a game brings out levels of hatred on a level and in amounts that are almost impossible to fathom.

Thankfully, the horrifying transgressions were quickly covered up by a woman with blankets and cutout hearts. There’s no way that it can completely remove the sting of the original action occurring but the small gesture proves the culture war isn’t over and has allies.

I wish I could say all of this was completely unexpected, but unfortunately it reminds me of the most racist thing I ever saw in my childhood, a memory that came roaring back in an instant.

Euro 88

I was 12 years old when we were visiting family in Germany and an unexpected opportunity came up: to go to a Euro Cup game with my father.

This was huge because we weren’t rich jetsetters or anything. My dad was a professor at a state school coming off a sabbatical abroad and doing a summer of research in Frankfurt, so something like this would likely never come around again. And indeed over three decades later, I can say that it never did.

So off we went to see England face Russia.

Little did I know that my one and only lifetime experience of watching national teams play in Europe would be one of the lowest points of the game, ever.

I was completely ignorant of the fact that hooliganism was so out of control that English clubs were completely barred from the rest of Europe. The situation was so dangerous that there was even talk of even barring the national team from the 1990 World Cup.

“Britain is being viewed worldwide as little more than a zoo of dangerous animals which are released upon innocent foreign cities with a government unwilling to tackle the crisis head on.”— Bert Millichip

To this day, I remember exactly nothing about the game itself, just the reactions of the hooligans that were cordoned off on their own section. I’d obviously never seen anything remotely like them or their behavior in my sheltered life as a suburban kid and the experience only got worse as the game went on.

The crowd antics started small, almost funny, like not participating in the wave going around the stadium. Not doing the wave turned into flipping the bird (all at once, when it was their turn for hands to go up) and then finally they killed off the fun atmosphere altogether when they all turned around en masse and mooned the rest of us.

All of this paled in comparison to what came next: they made monkey chants at their own player whenever he touched the ball.

I now know this player is a man named John Barnes and that he faced racism back at his club team as well. I couldn’t believe or fully understand the chants at the time and can scarcely wrap my head around it now, all these years later.

Afterwards, the English hooligans weren’t even let out after the game at the same time. The rest of the stadium filed out into the streets and we walked past what looked to my kid brain like a scene out of a WW2 movie: a small army of German police on horses and in riot gear with big scary dogs, standing next to trains to escort the English directly back to their hotels or jail, their choice.

I wasn’t Black or even English and yet this experience affected me deeply. Something inside me that I couldn’t verbalize made a small comparison between their hatred and my experiences being bullied as the brown kid in an all-white neighborhood.

It made me uncomfortable and I tried to forget it in the decades since. In hindsight, I had an incredible amount of privilege to be able to avoid painful memories, instead of being reminded of it daily.

So now I realize that I’ll never forget this story and that I shouldn’t, because the horror story I’d confided once or twice in private to friends over the years had the wrong punchline. I used to think it was a cautionary tale of how barbaric things were in a distant land in the ancient past. Now I realize the true moral of the story is something many others have always known: just because monsters aren’t out in the open anymore doesn’t mean they’re all dead and buried. Some are still sleeping underground, simmering in the dark.

An Ode To A New Old Friend

Wed, 30 Jun 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Today, I had a short conversation with an automated chatbot and it made me think of the first time I talked to a computer, when I was around 6 years old.

It’s fascinating when life comes full circle like that sometimes. Rewind a few decades back and the first programming I can remember was in the first grade, when I wrote out some lines in BASIC on my console computer to carry on a highly scripted conversation.

It was a Texas Instruments TI–99/4A and I loved the hell out of that thing. I wish I'd come up with a nickname as catchy as Threepio, so let's retcon this story and call it Foura from here on out.

Good old reliable Foura. It’s so 80’s that it looked like the love child of a DeLorean and a Cyclon.

Although it sounds like an impressive humblebrag to say I programmed a chatbot at such a precocious age, you have to trust me when I say that I didn't do anything remotely that complicated and instead it was just an insanely simple sleight of hand. It was just a few print statements that waited for responses and it wasn't at all like the super advanced artificial intelligence you see in the movies.

The stilted conversation went something like this:

Computer: “Hi Al! Did you have fun at school?”
Me: “Not really.”
Computer: “Did you make any new friends?”
Me: “Nope, they’re all still jerks.”
Computer: “Sorry, better luck tomorrow!”

It's easy to guess that this was all pre-written and the computer didn’t actually recognize any of my answers, it would just spit out the next question regardless.

Still, I finally had something awesome to take to school for show and tell. Even better, it was a smart little friend. One that talked back. Imagine you’re the only kid with a real live R2D2.

The demo at school went exactly as planned but not at all like I’d imagined.

I lugged Foura to school and found it one of those TV carts to ride around in, plugged the little guy in to talk and was ready to show it off to the rest of my classmates that had ignored me all year after I’d transferred in from another school.

The TV cart became a part of him and made him into an instant giant, like putting a pumpkin on the shoulders of the headless horseman. He stood all day in a corner of the class, five feet tall and silent. Ready to come to life towards the end of school as our final presentation.

This would be my big coming out party! I’d invented a life hack to make dozens of new friends at once.

You can see where this is going.

The time came, I talked through what Foura was, the games you could play, and how it “talked” with a program I’d written. And the overwhelming response was… crickets.

The vast emptiness of space. Listening to the infinite beyond, until the teacher said:

“Thank you very much Al, that was… interesting. Class dismissed!”

The class emptied out instantly like it was a fire drill and I was left standing with my robot. Not even the teacher got it.

Suffice it to say that I wasn’t the most popular kid in school. Foura didn’t help as much as I’d hoped.

I felt like all these kids could see exactly how uncool I was and I’d just hung a “Bully Me!” sign around my neck that would stay there until I finished grade school.

Which is exactly what happened. I would’ve been better off being ignored.

Things got so bad that my mom took me to self-defense classes, but all that did was get me suspended twice in fifth grade when I finally had the skills to fight back. My parents were at the end of their rope, trying counseling, sports, everything they could think of. My mom brought in reinforcements from the old country and had her sisters and mom fly in from Turkey, staying with us to lend a helping hand.

Finally, the eventual solution was to skip 6th grade and just get the hell out of that toxic environment, to make a fresh start new start in middle school.

It worked. All kinds of fun adventures started after the nightmare that was grade school.

Two things happened in quick succession: I went abroad for 7th grade and was the cool kid for a year as the visiting American, then I went to a tech-oriented school when we got back stateside. My junior high and high school was like heaven - an academically-accomplished magnet for math, science, and computers, yet also ethnically diverse and with only 10% white students.

I loved that school. It was full of freaks and geeks just like me, so I fit right in. I even ended up going into tech as a career and I’m thankful to this day that I’m still in this game, one that feels just as much like play as it does work.

Everything worked out in the end.

In hindsight, I realize now that I wasn’t actually as uncool as I felt in grade school but that the kids in grade school just weren’t my tribe. Especially when they flocked together in numbers. Trying to explain my rudimentary programming skills to those idiots was like expecting a pack of dogs to play the piano.

I found my people later. It all worked out. Those wilderness years in elementary school just didn't have the droids I was looking for.

Many years later, I ran into one of my bullies as an adult, in one of the last places I would’ve ever expected.

After college, my favorite place to hang out was the Flash user group in San Diego. It was Flash in name only and covered all kinds of new tech, anything you could use to make cool stuff online for fun or profit.

Decades before today’s advanced client-side javascript, there was the first version of Flash with Actions, which allowed you to do real scripted interactivity in the browser and was the precursor to Actionscript.

We’d get together at nights in random locations, people with day jobs in the industry that still couldn’t get enough playtime with these great toys. We were riding the enthusiasm of a hot new industry being born right before our eyes, changing by the day. We gathered from disparate areas like academia, private industry and the military, like some kind of anonymous addicts to a new drug.

Years before Hacker News and Meetups, the user group was a revelation for those of us toiling away in the bowels of San Diego’s white collar version of a service industry.

We were brains for hire during the day, curious explorers in our free time, looking for fellow travelers to form our rogue band of tech misfits.

A generation earlier, we would’ve read The Whole Earth Catalog and gone to the Homebrew Club, maybe even dropped acid on the beach. Now we talked shop, ate rolled tacos, and planned road trips to LA to see art exhibits by guys we read about on K10K.

My own personal bible was a hardcover of Paul Graham’s Hackers & Painters. My copy was just as annotated but way more dog-eared and worn down.

One day, we had a guest speaker that was a regional sales manager for software that I can’t remember now and doesn’t exist anymore anyway.

I towered over this little guy with questions about the product roadmap and took his business card, then realized who he was later at home that night when putting the card away and rued the missed opportunity to get some violent closure.

This was the monster that tormented me so much that I turned down my 2nd grade teacher’s invitation to skip to 3rd grade because it would’ve meant going deeper into his circle of hell. Poor Mrs Patrick, so kind and gentle but she had no inkling of the sacrifice she was asking of me.

Academics came second to personal safety and I cried my way out of that jam.

So I pinged my friend Brett about my discovery, the organizer of our Flash group. This is when I learned that one way to spot a real friend is when they offer extreme versions of help even though you didn’t ask.

Instead of just being surprised and chuckling about it, Brett's first reaction was aggressive loyalty. His exact words were “want me to look up where this fucker lives?”

Now that’s a “ride or die” bro right there.

I turned it down but it would’ve been an amazing movie scene straight out of Swingers:

“Hey! I had some more questions about your lecture!”
“Um, what? I’m at my home now?”
“I know, this’ll be quick, I promise!”
“Please get off my lawn.”
“Listen, I’m just curious what the support turnaround time is for a knuckle sandwich?”

And then pow in the kisser, a comeuppance decades in the making.

Go ahead and call the cops, I'll just tell them that it was revenge of the nerds.

Weirdly, I think of this kind of stuff a lot when I’m having fun with my little nephew.

He’s super into building massively complex structures in Minecraft, as well as physical creations with Lego blocks. His dream vacation spot is Legoland.

I try to encourage his interest in tech or whatever else he’s into but can't help it when my mind wanders. Whenever we’re off on one of our little adventures, I have little pauses here and there where I stop and wonder what kind of adult he’ll be and what the story is that he’ll tell himself about these formative years.

What is his self narrative? Will it be like mine, full of torment that he had to suffer through before finding redemption?

He’s wearing his Darth Vader beanie, gloves and shirt. We’re both wearing a bunch of gear because we had to run a mile in the rain to catch a showing of Rogue One.

Maybe it's a bit naive of me, but I hope that he’ll have similarly positive experiences at a vastly accelerated pace and without nearly as many drawbacks.

I mean come on, computers are cool now. It’s how you get your hands on the real version of Minecraft, which all the kids are obsessed with. So is programming, because that’s how you make unique customizations in the game, called mods.

Show and tell in the form of YouTube is also cool, so we started his first channel and he spent an entire weekend vlogging. He worked hard to shoot those videos and his appetite was barely satiated. I can tell that he’s just getting started on this journey to embrace his full nerdiness.

What really blew my hair back about how different things are today was when I found out that they even have summer camps in Minecraft where kids learn to code by making mods. It’s like a dev bootcamp for children. I would’ve done anything at his age to go to something like this, if it had existed.

My little guy’s head explodes every time I bring up the possibility of going to Minecraft summer camp and meeting other kids that are into it too. He’s been studying up on his reading skills just to get ready to program.

It seems that no matter how much things have changed, nerds of a feather still flock together, at any age.

So all this time later, after an entire lifetime as a tech enthusiast and 15 years into my career, I wonder: what is the first program other geeks write for themselves, after they get through the initial Hello World tutorials? Do they also create rudimentary chatbots to fill the void until they found their tribe?

I can't be the only nerd that wrote some version of my one-sided AI conversation with Foura or had similar epiphanies about finding your people. It’s funny to think of the tech industry as being so powerful at connecting people when it’s been fueled by an engine of lonely childhoods, but maybe that won’t be the case for much longer.

Originally published Mar 22, 2017 on Medium

Stop Multi-tasking Your Eyeballs

Thu, 24 Jun 2021 00:00:00 GMT

One of my favorite mindless timewasters is to scroll through beautiful shots of computer desk setups on Instagram, cruising through #workspaces and #minimalsetups.

Credit: setupcyper

Credit: pc.setup.yo

Credit: _devcommunity

Credit: setup_concept

They’re all gorgeous and inspire me to tinker with my own gear, but they also have something else in common: they’re almost always multiple screen setups.

It’s so stereotypical that you might think that’s the norm, so I thought I’d explain why I’ve always bucked convention in this small way and am a huge fan of using a single external monitor instead, like in this shot of my home office from last year:

My cramped little workspace during lockdown in 2020

I mean, I get why multiple monitors is so appealing. It just seems logical: having more screen real estate is like having a bigger work desk. You can fit more material on it without feeling cramped. Extra monitors are so affordable now, so why not? Intentionally restraining yourself to a single display doesn’t seem productive.

As far as I can tell, the science is mixed on which one is better for concentration and mental clarity.

There’s evidence in either direction. Some studies say that it›s better to have more screen real estate, no matter how many displays, whereas others say that there’s a higher cognitive load to constantly visually scan between multiple monitors. The effect is especially pronounced if they’re not of the exact same dimensions, with your brain subconsciously scanning the jigsaw puzzle of a big monitor next to the laptop’s smaller one.

“When we think we’re multitasking, we’re actually multiswitching. That is what the brain is very good at doing — quickly diverting its attention from one place to the next.

We think we’re being productive. We are, indeed, being busy. But in reality we’re simply giving ourselves extra work.”—Michael Harris

Basically, it comes down to personal preference. I find that working on a single monitor is a more focused experience and I get into a flow state more often with a single monitor, regardless of what research says.

The opposite is true too; I always felt disjointed with more than a single display. Early in my career when I thought more was better and tried out out multiple screens, I always felt a little scattered instead, with my eyes constantly bouncing around and scanning for new info.

Also on a purely practical level for designers, it’s better for the laptop since the graphics card gets better performance from driving only one monitor, plus also being vertical means better heat dissipation.

And lastly, there’s also the unexpected benefit of the laptop doubling as a headphone stand ;)

This setup might not be for everyone, so go ahead and try two or more screens if you haven’t yet. But don’t feel weird if it doesn’t feel right for you and you can’t put your finger on why. Try going against the grain and use a single monitor instead of the usual laptop and monitor setup.

I’ve sworn by my approach for years and trust me, it’s worth at least giving a test drive to see if it’s your jam too.

And in the end, that’s the real takeaway, one that has nothing to do with monitors: you should learn about and try out different workflows to see what actually works well for you.

Growth Through Writing

Tue, 15 Jun 2021 00:00:00 GMT

I’m writing this in the aftermath of a personal crisis.

Don’t worry, I’m not in any kind of danger, nor will I burden anyone with the particulars of the soap opera that enveloped our family over the last few days. That’s not the point of this article. It’s about the creative release of just writing.

There was a particular moment yesterday, amidst all the madness, when the dark clouds parted for a minute and I was caught off-guard by something nice. It felt surprisingly good to get a notification about my new friend Hannibal’s latest blog post. I looked down at my phone and felt a little sliver of light, a warm happy feeling. A reminder of our writing challenge that we started a few weeks ago with my old friend Pinguino.

Not burdened, tired, irritated or anxious, like creative challenges have felt to me in the past, to the point that I usually don’t participate in them. Instead, I was glad to be reminded of it. And that’s kind of a new feeling for me when it comes to writing, or at least new for the first time in a long while.

I’d completely forgotten about our little writing circle, to be frank. It’s understandable given everything going on and I wouldn’t have expected any less from anyone else in the same situation. I was in a fog and sitting around lost in my own thoughts, ruminating on the events and worrying about my wife, who was in a similar state of shock.

I was starting to go stir crazy, she was numb. We stared at each other and the walls, unbelieving of the social wreckage strewn all around us, how other people could be so cruel.

And then… ping …a welcome distraction. Creative juices stirred again.

Not a full-bodied fever of creativity. Not philosopher Slavoj Zizek’s “you are ready to suffer” embrace of the tortured artist. Just a small rumbling of normalcy returning. Today I’m stepping up to the plate to look for a base hit and stay in the game, I’m not swinging for the fences. Not even close.

And that’s ok. In fact maybe it’s better, instead of chasing the muse and riding the dragon every time.

There’s a newish idea in physical training that you should never be sore, that you should train to 70–80% capacity at most and go for volume of training rather than intensity. Better to go for 5 short runs a week than to kill yourself at a biweekly crossfit class with trainers doing their best impression of the Marine instructor from Full Metal Jacket.

A more measured approach goes against my personality. My usual motto in life is “why do things when you can overdo them instead” and I don’t regret it at all. It’s who I am and it’s gotten me to where I am today.

But it’s also led to burnout and swings, so maybe it’s time to try something different. Maybe I should leave some in the tank and embrace the small wins of grinding out consistency, if only to mix things up.

In addition to the weekly cadence, I’ve also been inspired by the specific writing of my partners. Thinking about Hannibal’s candor about interactions with his son, and Pinguino’s general love of life that shines through in her road trip pics, is what made me want to share this more personal writing, to open up and be more real instead of the unintentional success theater that comes from only sharing the good stuff or work challenges. You have to take the sweet with the sour, and the personal with the professional.

And, well, ok. If I’m even more candid, I really have an audience of not 2 but at least 3: Hannibal and Pinguino, but also myself, and maybe other friends if I can embrace this semi-public vulnerability. This writing helps clarify and structure my thinking, or at least gives me a worry stone to focus on and give time for the longer processing to happen.

There’s a comfort in writing this way, writing without publishing, at least not to a broader group. This post is semi-public: public in theory in that it’s available to anyone with the link, private in reality because it’s not linked from anywhere obvious. It’s a link in a reply tweet that’ll get lost in the shuffle, intentionally, living in a liminal space, floating somewhere between draft and finished article; private journal vs public confessional.

Obscurity by design. It’s comforting. Intimate. Connective. And hopefully what I think it’ll ultimately be, in some small measure: cathartic.

So that’s where I ended up this afternoon. It took a few swings at the bat to write something more personal than my first three posts and I’m glad to have done it. It reminds me of the early days of blogging and although we’ll never go completely back to the less commercial roots of the web, I’m encouraged by the occasional sparks of the indie web.

But I’ll come back to that last topic some other time. Today I’m going to save some in the tank.

UI Playgrounds

Mon, 07 Jun 2021 00:00:00 GMT

I was recently given a design exercise to update a Twitter app and I was instantly struck by the throwback nature of it. I haven’t thought about 3rd party apps for Twitter in a long while and it made me realize a few things about how underlying business factors can drive design experimentation in non-obvious ways.

For those that don’t know, 3rd party apps were a UI playground from the early days of Twitter’s existence, thanks to a relatively open API and exploding community interest.

It was a truly exciting time for indie developers and businesses alike as Twitter matured from an app to a platform and then eventually it’s own medium, with a vibrant smorgasboard of different apps tapping into the feeds. You had productivity-centric business apps built on Twitter like TweetDeck, as well as fun consumer timewasters like the Spymaster role-playing game.

“The most interesting product of Twitter’s popularity, to me, has been the explosion of Twitter API client software.”— “Twitter Clients Are a UI Design Playground”, Daring Fireball, April 2009

Then, as Facebook’s walled garden grew to dominate advertising and eyeballs, Twitter responded by trying to also become a closed platform, clamping down on the extended ecosystem in an attempt to drive eyeballs to their own apps instead. Among other things, they severely limited the API to cap the amount of data you could access and kneecapped the aspirations of indie developers hoping to develop the next big thing.

Out were the fun distractions and vibrant playground, driven out by the impossibility of viral apps. Now you’d be punished for creating something popular if you couldn’t afford it. The slow unstoppable commercialization of the web marched on…

App Store & Subscription Pricing

But wait. There’s another chapter in our story: the rise of weather apps for native mobile, a new vibrant ecosytem driven by Apple’s changes to their app store pricing.

After the API crackdown, indie developers didn’t continue creating Twitter apps and turned their sights to other areas to ply their trade instead. Burned by the twin flames of restricted API access and the inherently non-commercial nature of social media, they began looking for more useful ideas that regular consumers would actually pay for.

Recently, Apple responded to developer unrest of their own by allowing subscription pricing. This was a huge development for indie devs in particular, since the app store was littered with free and 99 cent apps. It made people unwilling to pay more upfront for apps that were priced sustainably and were more than mere timewasters.

Now, with subscription fees encouraging the slow build of consumer audiences and indie devs looking for fun areas to exhibit new thinking, the two trends collided and smart indie developers tried their hands at re-imagining the stock apps that shipped on the home screen, venturing into areas that were previously untouchable. Messaging, photos, notes… and the weather.

“I find weather apps to be an evergreen playground for design ideas — and that’s more true than ever now with iOS 14 widgets. ”— “Hello Weather”, Daring Fireball, April 2021

So that’s the abbreviated story on how weather apps became the new UI playground. It feels like every week I’m seeing a new one featured on blogs, whether hyper-accurate apps for data nerds like AccuWeather, or fun playful ones that emphasize quick bites of info like HelloWeather. The weather topic on Product Hunt is dozens of entries long and has thousands of followers!

They all have access to two things that Twitter devs don’t anymore: unrestricted data and consumers willing to pay for it. Hence the Cambrian explosion of interesting approaches we’re seeing now.

6 months of shooting photos around San Diego

Fri, 04 Jun 2021 00:00:00 GMT

After a 15 year ride on the rollercoaster that is the San Francisco startup scene, I moved back to my hometown in early 2020 to be closer to family. I went head's down at work during the pandemic and got adjusted to our new remote world order, before finally getting back to one of my favorite old hobbies this year: photowalks.

“Photography is a love affair with life.”
— Burk Uzzle

I just love going out to find interesting shots, taking little day trips around town to different spots. I’ll put the earbuds in and get into a flow state almost instantly, walking around while pleasantly lost in thought, people-watching and hunting for angles.

Scripps Pier at sunset, perfect for walking the dogs at low tide.

What really motivated me to practice my shooting skills more regularly is that I bought an actual real camera last summer, a Sony ZV–1. It came out last year as the first of a series of models made specifically for content creators and vloggers, with especially impressive 4k video output from a 6k sensor.

Sony ZV–1 with mini tripod, fuzzy mic cover, and some sticky baseball bat tape for a nice solid grip.

Well ok, it’s technically a point-and-shoot instead of a “real” camera with giant interchangeable lenses, but it’s my first non-phone camera in years and more than real enough for me. It’s been fun to put it through its paces and re-learn the basics like exposure and aperture.

A super obvious insight: pretty much any camera is good at portrait and macro shots compared to even the best smartphone.

I knew intellectually that cameras took good closeups but I'd gotten used to the programmatically-generated “portrait mode” as a substitute. There really is just no comparison though when you want to get a nice crisp foreground subject that’s bathed in a deliciously blurred backdrop.

Check out the little details around my dog’s face for example, with the intricate whiskers and hairs that usually get wiped out in my iPhone's portrait mode:

You have to really zoom in to see the fine details, especially around the ears.

Pull back and you might also notice the lack of weird color halos or clear spots where the phone often forgets to blur.

Another thing a camera does easily is to blur foreground elements:

Self-portrait with my handy little camera. Notice that my fingers, the camera and fuzzy mic cover are blurred, which is an impossible shot for phones.

I could be biased but I think those photos “pop” more, although honestly I’m probably the only one that notices. It’s become a pleasantly entertaining hobby even if these details end up going unnoticed by others.

It’s turned into a fun game to learn my camera better and find the kinds of shots that it’s uniquely good at.

Here's a few more examples with buttery smooth backgrounds:

My niece loves picking flowers with her grandparents.

I got my nephew into building model kits, right around the same age that I started.

Statue at Harbor Island.

Also, it’s been an interesting learning experience to find out what a camera isn't good at.

I knew that our incredibly capable smartphones have spoiled us these days with crisp images under most conditions, but I still assumed that photographs I liked were 'good' in the sense of 'good for a phone'. I figured that these amateur phone pics couldn't hold up to the larger dedicated lens and sensor of a semi-pro camera.

That turned out to be true. Well, kind of.

Apparently there are a wide variety of situations where a bigger camera still can’t beat our tiny little pocket companions, especially when doing things like handheld landscape photos or stabilized video. Those types of shots have invisible amounts of complexity under the hood that I never really appreciated until they came out blurry or shaky on my fancy camera, and I’d often still prefer shots from my phone even if they didn’t.

I realize now that my camera & phone both take amazing shots, just in different situations.

So in the end, my trusty old iPhone X also took a bunch of my favorite photos this year. Plus all of the camera’s output would end up on the phone anyway because that’s where I do color correction and share to social media, so I definitely got a lot of use out of both devices as a pair.

Another thing that’s great about photography as a hobby is that it can be a great icebreaker with strangers that are doing interesting things, like when I came across an artist teaching their craft to the next generation.

Check out more of his colorful work at mexikota_art on Instagram

With my camera in hand and inspiring me to drive around town for no good reason, I found myself seeking out colorful areas that looked like they had a story to tell. A recent highlight was Chicano Park, home to the country's largest collection of murals.

General Emiliano Zapata, 1879–1919

I’m especially grateful that this year included much-needed getaways to Julian and Big Bear, driving winding backroads through panoramic country scenery. It was exactly the change of pace I needed from feeling cooped up.

Pam’s Place, a roadside stand with a moving story (and amazing jerky)

We took in some majestic views when driving back from Big Bear.

One of the unexpected highlights early in the year was walking around a partially-opened Disney California Adventures on my birthday. It was an incredible opportunity to go into a theme park for free and simply absorb the ambiance without any rides, something that will most likely never happen again.

One place I particularly missed after moving away was Balboa Park. It’s just such a unique location: a world-class zoo, 16 museums and an assortment of theaters, gardens and other cultural highlights, all in one immensely walkable location.

My wife and I love it so much that we got married there!

Kate Sessions, 1857–1940. Scientist, horticulturist, nurserywoman, and “Mother of Balboa Park”.

“As long as men can breathe or eyes can see, so long lives this and this gives life to thee.”

We’re fortunate enough to live near a charming little hippie beach town named Ocean Beach. The slow pace of life and central location make it a hidden gem right in the middle of the city.

Although I grew up here and thought I knew the town inside out, it turns out that I still have a lot to learn.

I’ve been completely oblivious to the calm river that runs right through the middle of San Diego.

I’ve seen a few people fish and bike along the banks, but for the most part it’s empty by design because it’s meant to be unspoilt as possible. For example, kayaking is forbidden except for one time a year during an organized event to clean up litter.

Of course, no photo set of San Diego would be complete without its marquee attraction: the gorgeous beaches. Nothing clears my mind like taking my dogs out for a walk and getting some sand between my toes.

The famed Del Mar racetrack at dawn.

The marsh trails at the OB dog beach.

Me and my little guy at Del Mar.

La Jolla Shores on an early overcast morning, looking towards the pier at Scripps Institute of Oceanography.

Where the San Diego River meets Ocean Beach.

South Mission Beach

And rounding it all off, here's grab bag of random uncategorized photos that caught my eye:

My Principles & Work Philosophy

Fri, 14 May 2021 00:00:00 GMT

“UX is jazz. You need to be an expert musician and understand all the rules before you can break them.
Product design is punk. You need three chords and a “can do” attitude. Screw the rules (and screw jazz).”— Andy Budd

I’ve had one single overarching mission throughout my entire career: to be tenacious about creating the best products I possibly can.

After my formative initial years in academia, I jumped out into the fast-paced world of startups in 2007 and I’ve worn every hat possible since then, from early employee to founder. Startups are the perfect environment to refine leadership skills and break out of the confines of any rigid processes.

Please note that this is what works for me; it might not work for you and that’s more than ok. Everyone is different. There are an entire rainbow of types of designers and work environments, so don’t take this list as prescriptive, or even complete. This is just my current snapshot of a flexible, constantly-evolving set of guiding principles that serve my personality, skills, experience and preferred team structures.

My Playbook For Kicking Ass

1. Product-Centric LeadershipGood design means putting the product experience first, no matter the business pressures.
2. Opinionated ApproachUsers like obvious actions, teams like clear goals. So do the homework required to have strong convictions.
3. Continuous Learning & AdaptabilityStay flexible and inquisitive.

1. Product-Centric Leadership

I’m proud of my wide-ranging background. I started out studying neuroscience, transitioned to being a developer in academia, then jumped to startups to become a designer, founder and head of product.

The experience has given me a holistic understanding of both product details and overall market context. But no matter which hat I’ve worn, it’s always been in service of one goal: to make best-in-class products and experiences.

Here’s how I drive the value of design on teams:

Product-Led Growth: Build superior products, ones that meet real user needs with style and grace. I firmly believe that the only real way to achieve sustainable growth is with solid, thoughtful design.
Cross-Functional Expertise: Bridge the gap between design, product, and business. I strive to be a versatile player, equipped to understand and address challenges from multiple angles.
Design Leadership: Champion the importance of design within the organization. Elevate the role of design by demonstrating its impact on business outcomes and driving design-thinking across the team.

2. Opinionated Approach

I have always been a person with strong convictions. As long as it’s paired with collaboration and reflection, I have confidence that my skills, instincts and insights will drive solid work.

Here’s how my opinionated approach manifests in my work:

Bold Design Decisions: Make confident and informed design decisions. I draw on my extensive experience to create work that I believe in, even if they challenge conventional wisdom.
Constructive Disagreement: Don't shy away from expressing views or challenging others' ideas when necessary. A diversity of opinions leads to better decisions and more innovative solutions.
Experience-Informed Opinions: Base strong opinions on deep experience and knowledge. I'm always open to new ideas and feedback, but I also trust my instincts and insights gained from years of experience.

3. Continuous Learning & Adaptability

Curiosity is my main personal driver in work and life. That’s why I love working in tech: it touches every other industry. Every new product is an opportunity for a journalistic-type of research and learning.

Here’s how curiosity helps me stay flexible and keep growing in my work:

Growth Mindset: Maintain a commitment to learning and personal development, regardless of how much experience I have. There's always something new to learn or a fresh perspective to consider.
Agile Adaptability: Stay flexible and responsive to change. In the dynamic world of startups, the ability to adapt and pivot is key.
Seeking Challenges: Embrace difficult problems as opportunities to grow and learn. I don't shy away from complex challenges; instead, I see them as chances to push my boundaries and develop new skills.

Miscellaneous Extras

Want more? Here’s a collection of random inspiration:

“Specialization is for insects.” — Robert A. Heinlein

Typical Daily Tasks

Trawling through support requests to understand customer needs.
Interviewing stakeholders to distill business goals.
Doing competitive analysis.
Making prototypes to test solutions.
Prioritizing feature work.
And doing countless other things, without having to stop for guidance at every step.

“If you want to go fast, go alone.
If you want to go far, go together.” — African proverb

“Decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas.” — Groupthink: The brainstorming myth, New Yorker

“Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.” — It Worked for Me: In Life and Leadership, by Colin Powell

Design Sprints

Fri, 25 Oct 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Design Sprints have spread far and wide from their original development at startups and have become a ubiquitous practice on a global scale at a wide range of organizations. But now that it’s been a few years, it’s worth asking: do design sprints work? And if not, then what are alternative collaboration techniques?