#writing

This is a personal one, so bear with me. I’m sharing mainly because I can’t imagine giving myself this kind of space ten years ago. So I’m hoping that painting the picture could help other folks who may be in a similar space. Losing a limb kind of…

The internet is an awesome thing, but we’re ruining it. We probably can’t get enough people to stop shipping bloated and broken software, turn off their obtrusive newsletter sign up modals, or stop writing fake reviews for free products, but maybe the…

When it comes to sharing ideas that involve visual elements, source code, and unifying concepts that span disciplines, the friction to include different types of media and information makes technical writing rather tedious, and streamlining that process a bit has helped make it more enjoyable to write.

Some time ago, I removed all the tracking from my personal site, and I haven’t missed it. What started as a whimsical idea that was part performance-based, part referrer spam overload, and part backlash against Google evolved into a realization that…

With software development, there’s a spectrum out there with stability on one end and speed on the other. You can have an ultra-stable system that progresses incredibly slowly, or you can iterate blindingly fast on a system that’s a mess. Skip…

I face a dilemma, and I believe it’s a common one. Where should I spend my side project time? We all have ideas and passions. We all want financial stability and/or independence. But we have limited free time for side projects. So how do you decide…

I’m working on a big update to Starting & Sustaining to add in my experience gained running Sifter through my health problems. I also have some lessons learned through selling it. What started out as a whimsical plan to fill in some gaps and expand…

One of the most challenging aspects of running a business is understanding why customers leave or otherwise choose not to use your product. The underlying problem is that if a customer doesn’t like your product, they’ll generally just write it off and…

Historically, I’ve put an enormous amount of pressure on myself to constantly improve Sifter. Add a constant flow of customer requests on top of that, and there’s never been a shortage of feelings that Sifter’s not good enough. Until recently, my…

When I started writing Starting + Sustaining, payment processing was the most daunting topic. I felt that I had a cursory understanding of it all, but that turned out to be wrong. It is without a doubt the chapter that required the most effort to both…

Three months after deciding to write a book about building, launching, and maintaining a web application, the progress is good. I’d like to be further along, but took a break from writing to spend some time on Sifter. So where are things at and what…

The full stack for a web application can be rather overwhelming, but it’s not quite as bad as you might think. If you look at this list knowing only a small portion of the items, it can be incredibly intimidating. Really, though, it’s an incremental…

Keith Jacobs and I had known each other and worked together fairly closely for about 5 years when he wrote a check for $16,000 so I could quit my job and start Sifter. What’s more interesting is that after writing the check, he didn’t look at the…

Sometime around 2002, I attempted to start my own business, not as part of the grand plan, but rather as a fallback for lack of options. It didn’t do so hot. I was living at home and the highlight of each week was meeting up with friends at a bar on…

There’s been a lot of chatter lately about permalinks and URL shortening services. From what I’ve read, everyone seems to feel that content should never disappear and links should never break. While I appreciate the sentiment, I disagree. available at…

Answering feature and support requests consumes a significant portion of my time, but I’ve found that one simple rule of thumb has been priceless when crafting responses. Early on, I made the decision to answer every request or suggestion with a…

For my issue tracker, I’ve wanted a more natural process for updating issues. I decided that all activity would have to go through the comment form associated with each issue. This way any change in status, priority, category, or assignee could quickly…

It’s been quiet around here, but things are about to pick back up. I’ve been spending all of my free time designing and developing an issue tracker that I’ll be releasing as open source early next year. Until then, I’ll be exposing and sharing the…

Comments are back, and I’ve also made some changes to how I use Campfire. Going forward, depending on the context, some articles will have a time-boxed live chat, some will have comments, and some will have both. [Screenshot of the Campfire callout]…

[Campfire] Figure 1 ↩︎ If you’ve visited the site in the last week or so, you may have noticed that I’m experimenting with Campfire as a replacement for comments. This is a quick retrospective about how it’s gone. The Campfire experiment is now well…