Recent content from me
📣 I’m excited to announce my return to indie development to pursue Yaak ! I thought I’d take some time to expound on this decision because there are several reasons it could be a terrible idea: 👶🏼 Our first child was born 5 months ago 🚅 I still enjoyed my job at Railway 🌙 I swore I’d never build another “REST Client” 📈 Yaak is only at ~200 daily active users So…
Website analytics tools are complicated —and usually expensive. Sure, Google Analytics is free but it requires you to donate your user’s behavior data to help Google’s ad business. Yuck! Luckily, around the time GDPR was introduced, a handful of developers got to work and created some privacy-focused alternatives. Fathom is the most popular of these new tools but others like…
It’s interesting looking back on 2022 because so much of what I did lacked a unifying goal. The Original Goal was to grow my side-project portfolio and eventually return to self-employment, but that simply didn’t happen. Instead, I leaned into other things and found new interests to explore! Here are the some of the major highlights: 🏃 Completed my first ultramarathon! 🪵 Finished 10+…
Every now and again I sit down with some colored pencils and a reference photo, and try my best to mimic a photocopier. On its face this seems like an extremely difficult thing to do, but I discovered how to cheat . 🦹🏼♂️ When trying to replicate an entire photo at once, you often end up with a disproportionate mess that looks very displeasing next to the original. While it’s possible to…
March 22nd marked my first anniversary at Railway —the first job I had after being indie for 5 years. As I touched on in my 2021 Year in Review , it’s been a struggle. Fortunately, I’m in a much better place now and I’d love to share a few things that helped get there. Productivity is Cyclical Most of my struggles with work result from the guilt of not producing quality output on…
It’s hard to revisit my 2020 Review and not get bummed out. This year didn’t include nearly as many large changes and I struggled a lot personally. As a result, however, I tried a lot of new things and learned an extremely important lesson. Here are the major highlights. 🖨 Learned 3D printing 🪵 Got into woodworking 🪴 Grew a garden for the first time 💪🏻 Setup a space to workout and…
It’s wacky how much my life changed in 2020. I quit my job, moved out of the city, and restarted my career as an indie developer . My partner and I bought our first house and car, inherited 9 chickens, and got a dog! I went from being stressed and tired to creative and free. The story of this year is best told a month at a time, so let’s head all the way back to January. And, if you…
📣 I’m excited to announce that today is my last official day working on Insomnia —the indie project I started in 2014, grew to $20k MRR, then Sold to Kong in July of 2019. 🙌🏻 When the acquisition closed last year, I knew I’d want to start something new eventually , but didn’t expect it to happen this soon. My goal when joining Kong was to get Insomnia back on its feet ;…
There have been many times I’ve quit for the wrong reasons, either because things got too hard or I was afraid. But there were also times I’ve quit for the right reasons as a means to get somewhere better. Perhaps it was the time I quit competitive soccer to go back to the league with my friends; the time I was switched university degrees to pursue an interest in software; or the time…
Dad was there for sure. I don’t remember if Mom was but I’m sure she was too—probably by the house, watching anxiously, ready to cover her eyes when it happened. She never did get used to watching me do dangerous things. I remember every contour of that backyard. At the center was a small grassy hill, no taller than ten feet high; both the back and right sides were surrounded by…
Listen to episode 🎧 I recently sat down with Sean Washington to chat tech, side projects, and taking self-care. My appearance on the show has been a long time coming since Sean and I have been friends for a while now. It felt really good to put some things out in the open that have been on my mind for a while. If you give it a listen and have questions, feel free to send me a DM on Twitter!
A few years ago—while trying to get Insomnia off the ground—I took some time to “modernize” the codebase by updating its import statements to the new ES6 syntax. Here’s what it looked like. // Old way const http = require ( 'http' ) // New way import http from 'http' It’s a simple conversion, but there were hundreds of imports and I knew there would be bugs if I…
What if it has bugs? What if it sucks? What if they think I’m a fraud? 😟 My good friend Nick is getting ready to launch 30hourjobs , which got me thinking about the topic. Actually, dreading is a better word. Every time I’m about to launch something into the world, I get terrified. After launching dozens of apps and projects I can honestly say, it never gets easier. If anything, the…
2019 had a rough start. There I was, in the worst shape of my life, burnt-out on my startup, and living day to day without a plan. I was stuck, and desperately needed to get my shit together. So, I decided to pursue some creative hobbies 1 , started going to physio, and accepted an acquisition offer to sell my company 2 . Now that I have some time to reflect, I feel so grateful to have gotten out…
“How can I compete with them ? I’m just a single person and they’re a VC-funded company with millions of users.” 💩😩 It was 2016, I had just quit my job to start Insomnia , and was second-guessing myself. I knew I had the skills to build a great product but doubted whether or not I could compete with real companies who’d been around for years. Eventually, I asked…
The first version of my website, the site you’re reading this on, was born seven years ago. NodeJS was just released the year prior and I was eager to give it a try. So, I built and released an open-source Node blogging engine—aptly named Simple Blog —which ended up serving as the first true home for my content. Unfortunately, Simple Blog didn’t last long. I remember it…
I see a lot of people in the software community continually bring up the same problems and questions regarding side projects: Should I launch my side project? I never finish my side projects. Should I charge for my side project? I don’t have time for side projects. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to respond because the term “side project” is too generic. Why are you making the…
In July of 2015 I was burnt out, tired, and in desperate need of a change. My job of three years was no longer fulfilling and I couldn’t fathom continuing to give up a 40-hour work week to achieve someone else’s dream. Ever since discovering programming in 2008, I’ve been interested in the indie developer lifestyle. People like Marco Arment showcase that it’s possible to…
Listen to episode 🎧 I recently sat down with Ryan Chenkie to chat about my journey from indie to acquisition of Insomnia . We go over a bunch of interesting topics like fear of starting, burnout, and the decision to sell the company after three long years of hard work. If you give it a listen and have questions, feel free to send me a DM on Twitter!
Recently, I bought an iPad Pro and have been using it for basically everything except software development, which it’s not yet good at. This led to a problem, however, because I’ve been wanting to start blogging again but publishing posts requires many software-development-like activities which, again, the iPad is not good at. Here’s what currently needs to happen to publish a…