Like many people in tech, I’ve enjoyed the vibe coding era over the last year. I built dozens of applications, everything from Chrome extensions to full-blown web apps. It’s been a lot of fun working with programming languages and stacks I’d never touched before, and getting to sample tools like Lovable, Bolt, Replit, and Cursor. Now with Claude Code, it’s remarkable how easy it is to one-shot…
I’ve had a personal website for a decade and I post maybe once or twice a year. The worst part has always been trying to remember how to actually get my content live. My workflow is relatively simple, but there is a ton of friction when I try to recall the details of committing changes, where to create new posts, and the conventions for my specific static site generator. I usually end up making a…
Olga et Paulo: la Soupe (Maternité) by Picasso In tech, we love to mythologize the six-page memo. I’m certainly guilty of it . It’s been the gold standard for a thoughtful, thorough document that distills complexity and invites structured debate. But here’s the truth: no one’s reading it. Not because people don’t care, but because they literally don’t have time. Back-to-back meetings. Slack…
Writing code with AI is a lot of fun. Yes, debugging is painful. And it’s easy to get stuck in endless loops. But being able to think up something and watch it materialize in minutes is magical. One of the under-appreciated aspects of vibe coding is how easy it is to host projects with the many platforms out there. My preferred host today is Cloudflare Pages. Hosting a site on Cloudflare is free…
Defaults are like drugs. We underestimate their influence and we overestimate our ability to avoid them. For product designers, defaults are particularly dangerous–they provide license to manipulate user behavior in a guilt-free way. By providing choice, technically a user could opt-out of a strong nudge. But in practice very few will. Google is currently spending millions to convince a judge that…
Life is about trade-offs. Trade-offs mark decision points that can have long-lasting effects on your career, your family, and your happiness. One of my favorite articulations of the tension between trade-offs is, The Courage to Explore, the Commitment to Stay . This came from an interview with Sebastian Junger –most famous as the author of The Perfect Storm . He’s asked, what advice his…
I finally shut down a website I had been running since 2009–over 13 years. It was hard. The site was still generating income. And it felt like a huge inflection point was just around the corner. I’d had that feeling for many years–that I was one small change from huge growth. But the reality was it hadn’t been growing for a long time and required a non-trivial amount of attention and upkeep. Every…
As large platforms consolidate attention online, they are incentivized to launch new products that feed on that growing attention. Sometimes these products are a hit, and grow into their own standalone offerings that serve a unique customer need. However, most of the time they limp along, surviving on the residual traffic that is diverted their way by the core business. I call both of these types…
Amazon is the unquestioned leader of selling stuff online. Over half of US adults are Amazon prime members. 1 They are US ecommerce for many shoppers. And yet there is a growing problem with shopping on Amazon. It isn’t as simple or easy as it has been in the past. Shoppers are now flooded with choices that are difficult to sift through. Shopping on Amazon is not an enjoyable experience. For the…
h/t to @sriramk for this idea. There are some product efforts that are battles of inches . The goal is to generate a tiny incremental improvement in a high-leverage system–for example, a percentage point increase in a KPI that yields millions in incremental revenue. These battles of inches require rapid iteration and testing with lots of metric-driven experiments. The numbers guide the outcome,…
In the age of endless information, what if more information isn’t actually a good thing? In The Black Swan , Nassim Taleb asserts that additional information can actually be an impediment to forming knowledge. Instead of deepening our understanding of an issue, it can falsely deepen our confidence in pre-existing ideas and opinions. He describes this type of information as “toxic”. One of the most…
Reading a book is a big ask. Not only is it a large time commitment, the payoff is unknown. Sometimes it’s a big win. Occasionally it’s a waste. As I’ve struggled to read more over the past four years, I’ve developed five rules that have helped me to dramatically increase my reading output and overall reading enjoyment. Read physical books Acquire indiscriminately Read spontaneously Read several…
There’s something sticky about the number ten-thousand. When you need to pull a large but not-impossibly large number from thin air, ten-thousand fits nicely. A million dollars? No way. Ten-thousand? Sure. Creatives seem to gravitate towards the number too. The first 10,000 pots are difficult, and then it gets a bit easier. ― Warren MacKenzie, celebrated potter Your first 10,000 photographs are…
Although I’ve never considered myself a writer, I set a goal in January to become better at “using my words”. As I’ve struggled through a couple of blog posts, some longish docs at work, and even an online writing class, I’ve grown particularly interested in corporate cultures where long-form writing is integral to the way decisions are made and information is shared. Amazon is one of the most…
I was shuffling through some papers yesterday and came across a copy of David Foster Wallace’s Commencement Speech at Kenyon College . If it’s new to you, I think it’s well worth the 20 minutes to read or watch it . Especially this week. Like many commencement speeches, it starts off with a silly story. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming…
I just finished David Epstein’s amazing book Range , and have been thinking about it non-stop for the past week. Range serves as a counterpoint to the “standardization covenant” that is pushed upon us–the idea that it’s better to pursue a rigid goal with a head start, than a winding path of self-exploration. It also dives into how to be a better thinker in environments where feedback is limited or…
When people find out I have an MBA, I’m almost always asked about it’s value. Prospective MBA’s are curious if they should actually go back to school. And nearly everyone else is wondering if an MBA is in reality, a massive waste of time and money. In my mind, there are two groups of MBA’s, with some fluidity between groups. The first are hill climbers. Hill climbers go to business school to move…
[Originally posted on Medium ] Four years ago, I had a reading epiphany. I realized I wasn’t retaining anything from the books I read or listened to and decided that drastic action was necessary. I came up with a process that I thought was sure to make my reading more productive: I started reading physical books, began bookmarking and highlighting liberally, and most importantly, turned those…
Developing a better reading practice was a huge accomplishment for me in 2016, and I’m happy to still be going strong two years later. I ended up reading 24 books this year (vs. 21 in 2017 and 37 in 2016). I know that counting books read is a silly metric, but there’s something satisfying in seeing proof that I’m still prioritizing reading in a meaningful way. My note taking process didn’t evolve…
I recently saw these tweets by Keith Rabois: Assuming this was investor hyperbole, I did some more digging and was surprised to learn that Square Cash is doing incredibly well. And since both services are offering physical cards I decided to request both and test them out. I received the two cards on the same day. Each envelope contained a debit card attached to a single sheet of paper. I scanned…
2016 was the year that I really discovered books. It wasn’t that I didn’t read before. I read in the usual places–on planes during cross-country flights, on trains while commuting, and at home in bed, knocking out a couple of pages while half-awake. And of course I listened to my fair share of audiobooks. All of that reading (and listening) gave me a great deal of satisfaction, which manifest…
If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backward 10 years later. — Steve Jobs, 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech We’re all familiar with the narratives…
[Originally posted on Medium ] Over the past couple of years, I’ve started to consume more and more information through spoken audio — the explosion of new podcasts and the production of great audiobooks has made listening to that content an irreplaceable part of commuting, exercising, or relaxing. Very early on in my listening journey, I encountered a temptation that all podcast junkies are…
For much of this year I’ve been fascinated with Chinese technology companies. This first started when I saw MyIdol , a quirky Chinese app for building funny avatars, made it into the top ranks of the US app store, without being localized. In other words, an app with no English instructions, menus, or content was so compelling that everyone from Miley Cyrus to John Mayer was talking about it and…
Yesterday I saw the following sponsored ad on the reddit homepage. The link leads to the following Amazon product page (with an affiliate id in the URL): Having done a bit of reddit advertising in the past, I thought it was pretty clever–;a thumbnail of a hapless lobster and intriguing copy, begging for a click. The real surprise was seeing 334 comments on the post. That kind of engagement is…
Messages in iOS 8 I just downloaded the iOS 8 beta and after playing around, I can’t help but feel that audio messages will be a huge deal for a lot of people. Yes it’s a feature that’s existed in many messaging apps, but I think that including it natively will really encourage strong adoption, especially where it matters a lot: when driving. Obviously driving and texting isn’t safe, but I see it…
The Mega Millions jackpot just hit $309 million, and it’s great timing because March is National Problem Gambling Awareness month! The design of the Mega Millions ticket is interesting: it deceptively features a “Play Responsibly” banner down the side of each ticket, but by not clarifying what that means, they can simultaneously (1) claim they are warning consumers about the danger of their…
For your security , we may ask you these security questions to verify your identity. Security questions don’t make me feel more secure. Many times, the answers are either a simple Google search away, or they don’t even apply to me (although I wish I did have an older sibling and that they had a charming nickname). Most of the time, I’ll forget what I entered, if the answers are case-sensitive, and…
I just received this email from Google+, informing me I can get a custom URL for my profile: Clicking the Get URL button took me to my profile with this modal: In case you can’t tell, the URL is not changeable–my custom URL has been “preapproved”. If you meet the eligibility requirements, you can get a custom URL for your Google+ account or page. This means **you can choose one of the custom URLs…
I’ve been very interested in online payment systems as of late–with the Braintree acquisition by PayPal, international expansion by Stripe, and the launch of Cash by Square, the space is definitely heating up. In particular, Amazon’s new(ish?) Login and Pay with Amazon product seems to provide merchants with some great benefits: a simplified checkout process that leverages a user’s existing Amazon…
I’m an active user of Google apps and I spend much of my day inside of Gmail. I grew used to having a dark navbar at the top of the screen, containing direct links to other Google services, particularly Calendar. With a recent redesign, those links were placed in a drop-down identified only by a confusing grid icon. The Calendar link is placed in the bottom right of the app grid, beneath other,…
The more I use LinkedIn, the more I’m baffled by the way that they deceptively encourage people to pay for their premium service. Case and point: today I was researching a freelance videographer. Here’s his profile when I’m logged into my LinkedIn account: Uh oh! Apparently full profiles are only available to premium account holders. Let’s check the same profile in an incognito window: Like magic,…
According to Reuters , Amazon is planning on rolling out it’s grocery delivery service to several new markets: LA and SF this year and potentially up to 20 additional markets in 2014. This is an absolutely huge deal and an opportunity that extends way beyond groceries. I’m convinced that this is going to be one of Amazon’s most successful business units and here are 7 reasons why: 1. Amazon has…
My friend Tito has a small biotech hardware company he’s run on the side for several years. He wanted to do a quick refresh of the website so we took a crack at a redesign and after a couple of hours of work, here are the results: Before After (the redesign) What really blew me away was how powerful Bootstrap is for whipping together a simple, static website. Basic layout, buttons, cross-browser…
I’ve received two pieces of direct mail recently from ING DIRECT, inviting me to open an online checking account. It’s interesting to see how optimization of direct mail parallels web optimization. While the majority of the text is similar, the value propositions are very different.
Hell hath frozen over. Craigslist started testing mobile and tablet-optimized formats of their website starting last week. On account pages, you can see the following links at the bottom of the page: Clicking one of the options sets a cookie that dynamically modifies the page source whenever you visit a Craigslist page (this means that the classic version is visible briefly, before the elements…
How many emails do you send in day? If you use Gmail/Google Apps Mail, you can now easily find out detailed usage stats. There’s currently two methods for quickly pulling out stats: (1) Google’s Account Activity Dashboard or (2) the Gmail Meter. Google Account Activity Dashboard To get a high-level overview of your inbox habits, simply go to your Google Account Activity Dashboard to opt-in. You’ll…
Trader Joe’s knows marketing. They don’t want you to know this however. Their displays, signage, and advertising (including their kitschy “Fearless Flyer” newsletter) all convey the message that Trader Joe’s is just like the simple grocery store of yesteryear–healthy food, friendly staff, and a store that has a personality. Nothing demonstrates this better than the beautifully hand-drawn price…
AvantLink is an Affiliate Marketing network–think an intermediary between merchants who want to have an affiliate program and publishers who want to make money off of their content. If you need some more context about affiliate marketing, this video may provide some further clarification. As a long-time affiliate on the AvantLink network (i.e. somehow who makes affiliate commissions through…
Due to several sensational news articles in recent days (most prompted by the tragic events in Northern Japan), friends and family (read my mom) have asked me about the dangers of living so close to the coast, and particularly about the risk of a giant tsunami. I currently live a little over 2 miles from the Pacific, and wondered exactly what the possibility was that my apartment would be taken…
I recently decided to move a project onto Amazon’s EC2 from a dedicated box I’ve been running for a couple of months. Although it was initially intimidating, there are a wealth of blog posts, tutorials, and guides that really hold your hand as you get used to Amazon’s setup. I heavily consulted the following three guides (keep in mind that I decided to go with an Ubuntu install)–strangely the…
Maybe it’s my love for all things organization, but well-formed URLs are just plain satisfying. Unfortunately for me, I’m revisiting an old project and my half-baked URL structure is quite the Frankenstein monster. Rehabing it hasn’t been fun, but I’ve learned a bit about what I’d like to do going forward, when I start a new project. Properly formed and descriptive URLs are important for three…
[Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, nor do I aspire to be one] I’m excited to finally be able to write this follow-up post. I submitted my Articles of Organization at the end of April, and received back filing confirmation in mid-July. It was a long wait and unfortunately, there are still a couple of more steps to complete. The good news is however, I’m almost there! Ground to Cover: Complete the…
[Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, nor do I aspire to be one] I recently decided to take the plunge and incorporate–partially so I can have rad business cards, but mainly for legal and tax reasons. While operating as a sole-proprietorship has worked well so far, I run the risk that I could be held personally liable in the event of a nasty lawsuit. It also forces me to comingle my personal and…