28 Aug 2023 - Chicago Founders often struggle to pick the right business model for their product. Your business model is the fundamental engine that defines your business and goals. After people issues, I would bet choosing the wrong model for your strategy is the second largest cause of product failures. There are only a few possible options, so let’s discuss 1 them in detail from worst to best…
18 Aug 2023 - Chicago The 2010’s were dominated by people trying to make large-scale platform apps. Primarily inspired by the success of Facebook and similar platforms, this was a zero-interest rate phenomenon. We’re now going to see the pendulum swing back towards sustainable indie development – small teams making high quality apps solving niche problems with a simple business model. Some iOS…
31 Jul 2023 - Chicago We often talk about being authentic at work. But what does that even mean? Why do these discussions always turn into group therapy sessions without an actionable outcome? I think it’s because we don’t have the vocabulary to truly talk about the problem. To make progress, we first need to understand that there are 3 types of authenticity: cognitive, affective, and conative.…
23 Jan 2023 - San Mateo The EU is at it again with sweeping new privacy laws called the Digital Services Act (DSA) that will take effect next year. Their goals are admirable, but their execution is questionable. And like when GDPR rolled out, there’s a lot of open questions. For example, DSA requires that companies publish their Monthly Active User (MAU) counts for their EU users publicly. The…
13 Jan 2023 - Chicago Have you ever felt a twinge of anxiety when scrolling through social media, seeing all the fun events and experiences your friends are having without you? That’s FOMO, or Fear of Missing Out. But what exactly is FOMO, and why do we feel it? A couple months ago, I was traveling through Germany with my favorite people. One night, my brother-in-law was feeling FOMO for having to…
03 Sep 2020 - Chicago I recently wanted to sync events between Guilded and my personal calendar. The simplest solution is to generate an iCalendar file that is served from a personal endpoint for each user. When they subscribe, their calendar app basically acts like an RSS reader and periodically checks the endpoint for the latest list of events. There are plenty of libraries in your chosen…
20 Jul 2020 - Chicago While building Hiome , I needed to show a demo video of the product in action. Like most people, I initially tried embedding a YouTube video, but there were too many trade-offs (particularly privacy concerns and the inability to turn off related videos at the end, which would whisk people away from Hiome). In general, I lean towards minimalist setups and wanted to just host…
07 Apr 2020 - Chicago As our collective remote work experience continues, it’s been interesting watching my girlfriend adapt her 1:1’s with her direct reports to work better remotely. She’s using a shared OneNote file to track agenda, notes, and action items in one place. It works well, but things get lost easily. As I listened to her work this morning, I quickly sketched my ideal tool for…
19 Mar 2020 - Chicago Welcome to 2020. We’re in a strange new world of social distancing and shelter-in-place. Millions of people are adjusting to this new reality and learning how to work from home under duress. Countless bytes have already been spilled on how to work effectively and maintain your health while staying home. However, one area I’m seeing a lot of people struggling is socializing…
25 Sep 2017 - Chicago I just spent an amazing week traveling through Iceland with my girlfriend. Before the trip, she did a lot of research and made a detailed itinerary for us. Since Iceland is on a lot of people’s lists, I’ve listed the locations/activities in descending order of “must do” and linked our chronological itinerary at the end. First, there’s a lot to cover in Iceland. We didn’t want…
16 Oct 2016 - Chicago There’s been a lot of talk recently about making a decentralized web that is more secure and resistant to government control. Here’s why I think this is the perfect timing for this shift in thinking. Privacy Everybody is much more aware of privacy and data control issues these days. We’ve witnessed what governments, even in “free” countries like the US, are capable of. We are…
14 Oct 2016 - Chicago Fascinating read from NPR : “Nobody up until that point had ever had, I think, the courage to publicly say to users that they don’t control their data,” he says, “and honestly Facebook didn’t have the courage to say that.” This is something that has been on my mind a lot as I’ve started diving deeper into machine learning. We generate a tremendous amount of data everyday and…
28 Aug 2016 - Chicago If you’re not actively using Docker, it’s pretty difficult to figure out the difference between all the tools in the docker ecosystem. When I first started using docker last year, it all felt like a black box. I could get everything running, but if something broke, I had no idea where to look. So to help anybody who’s just getting started, here’s a brief breakdown of the…
14 May 2016 - Chicago If you’ve ever spent time around small children, you know that they can be very egocentric. They only talk in first person and everything revolves around them. It’s not their fault, they don’t yet have the experience to contemplate the world from any other perspective than their own. As they grow older, their scope of the world expands and they’re able to consider close…
30 Mar 2016 - Chicago Everybody knows page load speeds are important. The faster your page loads, the better your user experience. Google spends millions to shave milliseconds off their load time. Yet in practice, most sites are still terrible at optimizing for load times, instead opting to load megabytes of JavaScript libraries, custom fonts, images, and ads. As a developer who tries to be…
24 Feb 2016 - Chicago From The Seven Habits of Highly Depolarizing People (paywall): I didn’t vote for him but he’s my President, and I hope he does a good job. – John Wayne (b. 1907) on the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960 I hope he fails. – Rush Limbaugh (b. 1951) on the election of Barack Obama in 2008 What went wrong with politics this century, summed up in 2 quotes…
19 Jan 2016 - Chicago From Big banks brace for oil loans to implode Firms on Wall Street helped bankroll America’s energy boom, financing very expensive drilling projects that ended up flooding the world with oil. For instance, Wells Fargo (WFC) is sitting on more than $17 billion in loans to the oil and gas sector. The bank is setting aside $1.2 billion in reserves to cover losses because of the…
05 Jul 2015 - Chicago This thing on my wrist needs its own LTE connection. Sometimes I open links on the screen in my pocket, sometimes I reply to messages from the aluminum brick on my desk, sometimes I FaceTime with the large slate of glass on my coffee table, and sometimes I answer calls directly from my wrist. In all cases though, I am wearing a watch on my wrist and am carrying a large…
11 Jun 2015 - Chicago Yesterday, news broke that Apple is introducing content blocker extensions to Safari in iOS 9. Here’s how Apple’s developer documentation puts the new change, coming in iOS 9: The new Safari release brings Content Blocking Safari Extensions to iOS. Content Blocking gives your extensions a fast and efficient way to block cookies, images, resources, pop-ups, and other content.…
02 Oct 2014 - Chicago This is Yelp’s default message when sending a friend invitation. It feels awkward and forced. Friends don’t share “insights on local businesses,” they recommend restaurants to each other. They don’t share “mobile check-ins,” they tell each other what they’re doing. And while we’re here, why include my last initial when addressing me? And why is the button asking me to “view”…
24 May 2014 - Chicago Every night before I go to bed, I have to think about 3 things: What time is my first event tomorrow? What time do I have to wake up to make it to that event? Who will sit on the Iron Throne next? Like most people, I use my smartphone’s alarm clock app as my daily alarm. That smartphone also has my calendar and location data. It knows where I have to be tomorrow morning and…
08 May 2014 - San Jose I love Gmail Filters for setting up rules to automatically sort my email. However, I prefer using Apple’s Mail app on both my desktop and phone, which means I’m not able to take full advantage of Labels. In particular, there’s no way for me to receive a push notification for an email unless it goes in my inbox. For a long time, I’ve wanted a way to create time or…
26 Apr 2014 - Chicago Today, I came across the Lumo Lift , a fitness tracker and posture sensor available for preorder. It looks like a neat little device, and assuming it works, the posture tracking/correction system is a very cool and useful feature. However, two things stood out to me. Yet Another Sensor The Lumo Lift is designed to be worn near your clavicle or shoulders. It tracks posture,…
01 Mar 2014 - Chicago Last weekend, I attended a Gogo hackathon organized by Monkeybars . Most of my time was spent playing board games , watching movies, and just hanging out, and I did not intend to actually compete in the hackathon. But then I saw the following screenshot of Gogo’s in-flight portal on a Delta flight. To put it lightly, this portal sucks. There’s no significant call-to-action.…
22 Dec 2012 - San Jose I received my first copyright infringement take down notice today! From who? Sky Italia , a News Corp. company. For what? A “ How to post to a forum on Moodle ” tutorial I posted on YouTube in 2007 for a Google Summer of Code task. That means it was requested by Moodle, and sponsored by Google. It consisted of a screencast of Moodle and my voice over. I woke up to the…
03 Dec 2012 - Chicago What is a D-U-N-S Number? The D-U-N-S Number is a unique nine-digit number that identifies business entities on a location-specific basis. Assigned and maintained by Dun & Bradstreet (D&B), the D-U-N-S Number is widely used as a standard business identifier. To learn more, visit dnb.com . Apple recently switched to requiring a DUNS number to open a company developer account.…
02 Dec 2012 - Chicago Want to share code from the future? Just set your system clock to some future date and then do a git commit. When you push those commits to GitHub, they will appear to be from the future! Since git uses your local system clock to keep track of commit times, GitHub simply trusts and reports those back, resulting in some potentially confusing histories. Ideally, GitHub would…
14 Oct 2012 - Chicago If you’ve ever built something yourself or worked on a startup, you know that your product is like your baby. You are acutely aware of each flaw, but if somebody else insults it, it’s personal. Last night, I met a student, and I told him he should use Tabule for his classes. Not knowing that I was the founder of Tabule, his immediate reaction was, “Oh, Tabule. That’s just…
07 Oct 2012 - Chicago Every developer has a list of tools and tweaks that they build up over time to increase their productivity. Here is a list of the little things I find useful to install everytime I set up a new machine. For reference, I am running Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, so many of these tools may be specific to that platform. QuickLook View plaintext files without an extension in…
25 Sep 2012 - Chicago Anybody with multiple Apple devices that are synced to the same iCloud account has experienced the problem of being bombarded with iMessage alerts. Each message would cause all of your devices to light up and beep. This got so annoying that I finally turned off vibrations and sounds for texts on my phone. There have been many suggested solutions from the community, almost all…
11 Jul 2012 - Chicago I set out to design my first HTML email today, and put together a simple CSS design in under 15 minutes. Then I looked at other HTML email templates out of curiosity and noticed that every single one of them used tables for their layout, even Apple’s. Turns out that most email clients don’t accept the standard CSS that we’ve grown accustomed to in browsers, making even IE6…
08 Jul 2012 - Chicago I haven’t posted any updates in a long time, but I have set a personal goal to improve my blogging presence and keep this site updated. I’ll start off by giving a quick summary of where my life’s at now. I graduated from the Illinois Institute of Technology with Bachelors in Computer Science and Psychology, a minor in Entrepreneurship, and a specialization in Artificial…
01 Jan 2012 - San Jose I recently switched to generating this blog using Jekyll , and hosting it on GitHub Pages . Over the years, I’ve gone through many blogging platforms before arriving at my current choice. This is a quick overview of the platforms I’ve tried, and my thoughts on each one. Wordpress I used to host my own Wordpress blog up until a few years ago. Back then, Wordpress was by far…
16 Dec 2011 - San Jose I just realized that some people think the Samsung Galaxy Tab is a type of iPad. I heard the following conversation a few days ago: Person A: I just bought this new iPad. Person B: Nice, is it a Galaxy Tab? Person A: No, it’s an iPad. Person B: Yes, but is it a Galaxy Tab? At first, I thought person B had simply misheard person A, but that didn’t explain the clarification.…
04 Jun 2011 - San Jose There’s a useful little shell command posted here to calculate the reading time of a text selection based on the average reading speed. Such a simple feature got me thinking about all the places this could be used, like RSS readers or Instapaper to let me filter my articles based on the amount of time I have. The most useful place I’d love to see this implemented is in my…
20 May 2011 - San Diego Found on a San Diego beach, the attention to detail in this sand castle is beyond ridiculous. The creator places each layer of sand one inch at a time to get that level of detail. He’s been building sand castles for nearly two decades. He started when his kids were toddlers, and just kept doing it even after his kids left for college and moved on. His passion shows.…
20 May 2011 - San Jose via blogs.forbes.com A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. It really does take a lot of courage to cut down features and “get rid of the crap,” but if you can, you come to the following realization: People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not…
10 May 2011 - San Jose Aza Raskin, discussing user interface design : “The society that separates its warriors from its scholars, is a society that’s doomed to fail. Because if you do, then your idiots do your fighting, and your cowards do your thinking.” The exact same thing is true of designers and engineers. Raskin quotes an ancient Greek philosopher to illustrate why designers and engineers…
18 Mar 2011 - Chicago I read a post last month about phone etiquette in social events that encouraged people to switch to airplane mode so that calls would be sent straight to voicemail while you could keep using the social features of the phone for the conversation. While this strategy makes sense for showing pictures from my local photo library or taking notes, there is little else my phone can…
13 Mar 2011 - Chicago via blogs.forbes.com Good ideas are like Nike sports shoes. They may facilitate success for an athlete who possesses them, but on their own they are nothing but an overpriced pair of sneakers. Sports shoes don’t win races. Athletes do. Bet on the jockey, not the horse. My professor used to drill this saying into us in my Intro to Entrepreneurship class 2 years ago. I still…
13 Feb 2011 - Chicago via areallybadidea.com Rap music is music for entrepreneurs. Other genres write about love (rock, r&b), unattainable love (indie), nothing at all (electronic / dance), or redneck issues (country). But only rap music is almost maniacal in its focus on success, the acquisition of money and subsequent dispensation of it.
30 Jan 2011 - Chicago via fastcompany.com (Indeed, search Google for “stop Farmville notifications,” and you’ll get over 50,000 results.) Why do people always insist on citing the number of Google search results as a measure for popularity?
28 Jan 2011 - Chicago I just received Pivotal Tracker’s email regarding updates to their pricing plans that were announced last week. While their previous announcement was totally understandable (a company needs to make money), it was a bit of a bummer to suddenly see such a great free tool cost money. Their new email, on the other hand, presents a new pricing structure that they have modified…
28 Jan 2011 - Chicago Well, ok, not actually introducing , since Odorno isn’t a real product. It’s an early-stage business idea my partner-in-crime Muhammed Fazeel and I came up with our first year in college. The idea was that the excitement of moving into a new home, apartment, or dorm was often muddled by the stress of having to shop for furniture. Usually, furniture shopping required taking…
28 Jan 2011 - Chicago Last night, I was watching The Colbert Report do a segment on Obama’s State of the Union address. During one part of the speech, Obama encouraged entrepreneurship as a cure to our current economic crisis, reminding us that America is responsible for putting cars in driveways and computers in offices. Colbert made a joke about how we then proceeded to put computers in cars,…
28 Jan 2011 - Chicago via wetzler.me In the end, it really came down to one incredibly genius idea: Dropbox limited its feature set on purpose. Insightful post about why Dropbox beat out all the other competing backup solutions… Keep it simple, stupid. To be fair, most companies that complicate their feature set don’t do it because they enjoy writing more code and making complicated products. The…
27 Jan 2011 - Chicago Quick update: I’ve redesigned the Metamorphium site to give it more of a focus on some of my photography, rather than a boring grey background as before . I’ve also decided to just link to my Posterous blog itself rather than using the Posterous API to show my blog within my own site without Posterous’s branding. This was merely a decision of convenience, since I did not want…
27 Jan 2011 - Chicago via 37signals.com A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be. -Wayne Gretzky (via advice from his father, Walter Gretzky) I love finding inspirational quotes like these in the middle of working.
21 Jan 2011 - Chicago This is an old article, but I recently found it in my notes and figured I’d post it here. via 37signals EventVue was always a vitamin instead of a pain killer. Conference organizers typically liked our product but none of them said they needed it. It didn’t make their lives easier, make them more money or cut any of their expenses — it was just ‘nice to have.’ Not everything…
16 Jan 2011 - Chicago Comment from my Facebook news feed: haha… droids are to complicated to operate when drunk… id rather have my blackberry back for pictures IT WAS TOO EASY That must be the ultimate test in usability. If somebody can easily use your product while drunk, then you know it’s well designed. On the other hand, if they can’t even figure out how to save a picture, you should probably…