PaulStamatiou.com - Technology, Design and Photography
This isn't my usual deep-dive article where I unpack a specific subject such as an app I built , my obsession with craft , or revisiting an old iPod . I set out to share a few reflections and musings on a year marked by personal and professional change. This was a year of stripping back to the essentials: where I live, how I work, and what I build. I've been running this site for just…
I'm no longer browsing the web ; I'm consuming AI answers instead. I love and adore today's so-called AI answer engines : tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok, Copilot, and Gemini. I use them at least a dozen times throughout the day, and I'm sure you use them frequently as well. Their convenience is undeniable. I turn to these tools to save me some clicks, but I give up…
There's nothing glamorous about being a designer at a startup. It's a role that frequently values speed and pragmatism over going deep in the craft . It's not all big launches, viral tweets, building for happy paths, and clear-cut product requirements. However, it can be incredibly rewarding. The fun comes from being able to excel at learning new skills and wearing many different…
Please read this Stocketa article in a browser to see embedded Stocketa videos. It was March 2020, I was in New England when covid quarantine had just begun and I found myself much more homebound. In these situations I'm not one to just do nothing. I always have some sort of project or hobby to keep me busy, be it taking and editing photos, writing detailed blog posts, or coding something. I…
I started taking photography more seriously about a decade ago. I shot photos in RAW with increasingly higher megapixel cameras, spent a lot of time post-processing photos—see my 30K word post about building a custom Adobe Lightroom PC —and designed and built custom photo stories to share them. While I would go through the process of culling photos that I published online, I didn’t do that for…
A lot has happened since I published my article on the open source decentralized social networking service Mastodon a few weeks ago. I saw a lot of interest in and discourse around that post that was great to see. Since then, a few notable things have happened that have caused Mastodon usage to spike yet again. Twitter unsurprisingly ended up entirely banning third-party Twitter clients, including…
A Mastodon app called Ivory I first wrote about Twitter (née twttr) just over 16 years ago. Over the years, Twitter’s place and impact in the world has become clear. It’s not just a place to hear about breaking news, keep up with celebrities or see what your politicians are saying. It’s a place where communities are formed and thrive. It is the global town square. But that’s all been changing…
After 10 years of working at large companies with thousands of employees, I recently joined a 10-person startup. It's called Rewind and I am absolutely loving my new role for a lot of reasons. It's a bit different from my previous roles: I’m a product designer but I also spend time building my designs in Xcode. I love having a hands-on route to directly affecting product quality. Much of…
1,000 songs in your pocket. You’ve probably heard that iconic marketing slogan before even if you never had an original iPod. Apple referred to the iPod as a "breakthrough digital device" when they announced it. The first iPod came at a time when the portable audio player landscape was.. nomadic (pun intended) at best. MP3 players were already around when the iPod came out in 2001. Sales of early…
It’s still early days in crypto. That’s what you’ll hear everywhere when you start digging into crypto and web3 today. For most new users this unfortunately feels a bit closer to the wild west . There are a myriad of situations where they might not know what's happening and where they don't trust the system, services or tools they're using. Early adopters face foreign terminology,…
My code-generated NFT collection, Crypto Mondrian //DARK . I first dabbled with cryptocurrency in 2011 when I wrote an article about mining Bitcoin on AWS EC2 GPU clusters. My interest in crypto ebbed and flowed over the years before actively avoiding the space until earlier this year. It felt like there was a lot of noise and hype around volatile, speculative asset holding and not much innovation…
It was just a year and a few months ago that I first began learning about and tinkering with Swift and SwiftUI. I followed tutorials and learned through lots of trial and error as I worked on my stocks tracker app, Stocketa . Picking up SwiftUI was one of the best decisions I’ve made. SwiftUI is a massive advancement in making iOS development more accessible for all. I don't consider myself a…
It happens to me all the time. I have some idea or other need and before I know it I've registered a few new domains. Eventually I may need to setup some email addresses on those domains. Then I need to decide if I really want to pay ~$5-6 per month to setup email by setting it up with Google Workspace Essentials (née G Suite), Fastmail, ProtonMail or their ilk. Before you know it you have a…
There’s no need to preface how wretched, horrible and hard 2020 was for all of us with the global pandemic and all that changed in the world. Most of us stayed home an insane amount and refrained from any kind of travel, domestic or international. My girlfriend Katherine and I had plans for some big trips this year, which we of course shelved. In the past one of my most time-consuming hobbies was…
I'm no stranger to keeping track of notes and documents across a myriad of apps, services and digital to-do lists. I use Notion, Apple Reminders app, Bear app, sometimes I use Ulysses, random plaintext TextEditor files and Google Docs. But it really doesn't matter what I do with my digital documents as I always end up having some pen and paper on my desk at all times to take notes,…
It has been years since I’ve used RSS to keep tabs on interesting blogs I’ve found and websites I like. Social media took over and blogging went from being ubiquitous to being more of a novelty. Google shutdown FeedBurner 8 years ago; Google Reader was shuttered shortly after. Feedbin on my iPad Pro I used to follow a few hundred personal weblogs but eventually that number dwindled down as people…
I have had some kind of side project for as long as I can remember. They have quenched my curiosity about new technologies and tools, kept my design and development skills fresh and often given me something to put out into the world. Most of the time my side project has been this website. Redesigning it, debugging it, optimizing it, writing for it, shooting photos for it, editing photos for it,…
I recently began using Netlify for some of my side projects. Netlify is a modern web hosting provider that integrates a mix of offerings like a fast CDN and customizable build system. You specify how your website or project should be generated (ideal for static site generators like Jekyll) and all you do is run a git push when you're ready to publish. Netlify will automatically generate and…
I'm going to try something different and write more short-form posts here. Over the years my focus has been increasing the quality of my articles. They've ended up becoming increasingly time-consuming to create. The same goes for my photosets, which also often require a bit of custom design and development in addition to the many hours photo culling and editing. While that will not…
A USB-C YubiKey 5C security key plugged into my ThinkPad X1 Carbon Every week I come across another headline about how someone got hacked and within moments many of their online accounts had become compromised. These aren't simple cases of bad actors using account credentials from large public data breaches and the unfortunate result of people using the same password across many websites.…