What I wish I knew about email development before I started
Nine hard-earned lessons on coding well-designed emails and getting them reliably delivered.
Ben Birnbaum
Ben Birnbaum
Latest posts
When you might die
As a side project, I built whenyoumightdie.com , a website that helps you visualize the uncertainty around when you might die. I built this not as a gratuitous exercise in morbidity, but rather as a way to remember that there's no time to waste.
My favorite books of 2020
It was hard to find the time and headspace to do a lot of reading this year (for obvious reasons), but I did manage to read a few good books. Here are some of my favorites.
How a side project has made me a better manager
When I was first asked to be a software engineering manager, I knew that saying yes would come with tradeoffs. On the one hand, it would be a chance to have more impact, mentor people, and develop my leadership skills. On the other, it was a job change: instead of
When you find out you’re the copycat
It was a rollercoaster of a week. It began when my side project, which I’d been quietly building for seven months, unexpectedly made it to the number two spot on Hacker News. It ended with me considering whether I should give up on the project completely.
Strategic procrastination: keeping my perfectionism at bay
Most people have more to do than time to do it. Strategic procrastination is a trick I use to make sure I have time for important but non-urgent tasks.
Contingency and the Cold War
It's crazy how close the world came to accidental destruction during the Cold War.
Two lessons on reducing sign-up friction
I learned the hard way how important a carefully designed sign-up process is. I saw a large percentage of interested people fail to sign up because of easily preventable flaws in the flow.
Cortado
I built Cortado to make it easy to stay up to date with refreshing your feeds all day. It's a web app that gets the latest content from sources like Twitter, Hacker News, Reddit, and Youtube, and sends them to your email in a single daily digest.
Run visualization
Toward the end of 2014, I decided to take a break from running the same routes and instead systematically run on every street in a region around the Prospect Park. The animated visualization of these runs is surprisingly pleasing.