“Be curious, not judgmental” - Walt Whitman The other day I listened to a podcast between Ezra Klein and Judson Brewer talking about anxiety. If you have even mild bouts of anxiety, I highly recommend it: Ezra Klein and Judson Brewer on Anxiety The core takeaway for me was around meditation, and how a key component of that is curiosity. A ton of meditation centers around focusing on your breath, but what does it mean...

When building products, there are two things that seem extremely important: scope and speed to feedback. If you can ruthlessly prioritize, you can focus. If you can tighten your feedback loops, you can iterate faster. Both of these things will allow you to move very fast in the right direction. But more than that, James Somers talks about the perceived weight of work being reduced dramatically by working quickly in general: Speed Matters In essence,...

One of the things that got design a seat at the table was data-driven decision making that could be defended. I don’t have any evidence to support this, but I really think that design’s difficulty in justifying itself to engineering is why products in technology had pretty poor design until the last 10 years. Apple really changed this around the time of the iPhone. It was as if suddenly everyone awoke from their self-imposed stupor...

After building multiple applications used by thousands of paying customers I feel like I’ve converged on a philosophy of design that could be summed up as ‘Design for Repetition’. Is your app used a lot? Or a little? Is your app meant to be engaging? Or are people supposed to get in and out? A lot of design decisions can be solved by understanding not just the way your user wants to interact with your...

When I was younger I had multiple websites where I posted often. I didn’t care what I wrote because I was just writing for my friends. Doing this improved my writing dramatically. It forced me to focus on who my audience was, have a goal in writing (always write to persuade!), and to write for actual consumption. People I knew actually read my site! Having any audience at all was just fun. But then I...