Notes on technology, leadership,
and the systems behind both.

I’ve tried a lot of task systems over the years. Most of them failed for the same reason: they required too much care and feeding. Too many categories, too many...

I have to keep reminding myself of something simple: you can just do things. No one is stopping you from signing up for that class, trying that new restaurant,...

The headline: The Winter Olympics were a fun distraction this month.Going into the Winter Olympics, I had a few teams I was especially excited to follow.The Uni...

Technology isn’t making us stupid. But the way we’re using it might be.The real problem isn’t innovation itself. It’s the quiet shift from using technology to r...

Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari is one of those books that sneaks up on you. It starts comfortably, tracing how humans have always organized themselves around inform...

I think a lot about trust and how I’m perceived by the people I manage and the peers I work alongside. Not in a self conscious way, but in a practical one. Trus...

I recently finished Engineering Management for the Rest of Us by Sarah Drasner and it immediately earned a spot on my short list of books I recommend to enginee...

The headline: Trying to stay above water.This year really kicked off with a violent occupation of armed forces in Minneapolis being overtaken ramping up and mur...

I’ve been playing with the Statamic 6 beta, and I even pushed it live on this blog. It’s currently in beta 3, but it already feels far snappier than I expected....

2026 hit the ground running, so I didnt get to push this post out at the beginning of the year like I wanted to. But here is a little reflection post from m 202...

I’ve been journaling for a long time. Like most habits worth keeping, my relationship with it has been on and off.For more than twelve years, I’ve been adding e...

Seemed like all the travel that I’ve done this year has crept into November (and December), with holidays, on-sites and a couple brief getaways. It’s also the t...

There’s something about crossing even the smallest thing off your list. Closing a tab. Shipping a tiny change. It gives you a pulse of momentum.With a long holi...

The entirety of October, the US government has been shut down. Starting in November, the republicans have decided to not fund SNAP, which feeds 42 million peopl...

Following up on the last post where I talked about over communicating, I want to share a tool I use when critical feedback is not landing.When I give critical f...

If something’s worth communicating, do it twice.Once to inform. Once to confirm.Leaders often share something important once, in a Slack post, in an email, or a...

Leadership isn’t always loud. It’s not just the team speeches, the bold calls, or the product launches that make an impact. More often, it’s found in the quiet...

Product Driven is a refreshing read for engineering leaders who are looking to shift your team’s perspective on shipping code and thinking about outcomes for th...

August is always a fast rollercoaster into the end of summer. Birthdays, work trips, planning and trying to enjoy the outdoors as much as possible before the co...

Why aren’t we using AI for everything?If you look around, it seems like every product and headline has AI baked in. But has it really changed much in your daily...

Like clockwork, got really busy and didn’t publish a lot in June. but im back now in July.This month’s theme was primarily about organizing projects, collecting...

I read The Emergency with a knot in my stomach.Thomas Fisher writes from inside a South Side ER at the height of the pandemic but what makes this book hit harde...

There’s something special about building a tool that only you will use. No roadmap, no backlog, no user feedback loops. Just a problem, an idea, and the curiosi...

I see a lot of engineers, including myself, let an idea run loose and balloon until we don't even want to work on it anymore. We start optimizing for multi...

I've always wanted to be someone who journals in physical books, leather bound with nice thick pages. But for some psychological reason, I always felt like...

I'm so sick with ecommerce sites that interrupt my product research with intrusive full screen popovers. I don't want to sign up for a newsletter for...

May has been rainy, dry and all around busy. I have spent a lot of my free time diving into code, learning new things and building small utilities for myself, r...

Finished Superagency by Reid Hoffman this week, and it’s one of the more thoughtful takes on AI I’ve read lately. It’s not about the hype or the doom, but inste...

I’ve got a pretty dialed-in Notion system where I track daily metrics and roll them up by week, month, and year. It’s definitely a nerdy habit, but honestly, I...

I’ve always been someone who reads a lot across different topics. I think of it as passive learning. I take in ideas, try to connect them, and build context for...

No-code tools have opened up a whole new way to build. You can stitch together an MVP in a weekend, test a concept with real users, and move fast without writin...

Last week, I wrote about how carving out focus time as a manager helps me lead better. It gives me space to think, see the bigger picture, and be proactive inst...

As a manager, my calendar doesn’t really belong to me. I’m hopping from 1:1s to planning meetings to reviews to unexpected “got a sec?” pings. It’s a blur of co...

There’s a lot of energy spent on growth. Marketing budgets, product launches, funnels, onboarding flows. And don’t get me wrong—getting people in the door matte...

I started blogging again this month, dusting off the old blog and updating its platform and design to version 7. I'm sharing thoughts about leadership, eng...

I recently finished reading Moonshot by Mike Massimino, and one quote in particular has stuck with me: “Admire and care for everyone on your team.” It’s decepti...

This year, our golden retriever puppy has been the ultimate reminder of a lesson I’ve preached for years: take the first step first. Progress matters more than...

Brian Alexander’s The Hospital: Life, Death, and Dollars in a Small American Town is a sobering, deeply human look into the quiet collapse of rural healthcare i...

I recently bought an Xbox Series X. I haven’t gamed seriously since the Xbox 360, but with the next Grand Theft Auto dropping this year, I figured I’d get ahead...

As I fired up the blog machine again—upgrading Laravel from 9 to 12 and Statamic from 4 to 5—it didn’t take long to hit some pretty big bumps. Turns out, a quic...

I think it's time to start blogging again. I have a backlog of things to write about, including book reviews, music and video recommendations, technical co...

I've been in a lot of frustrating meetings during my career, and many of them have one major problem in common: the participants are talking, not listening...

Apple introduced the Apple Vision Pro last week to some mixed reviews. But it reminded me of all the other products they’ve introduced over the years that redef...

Over the month, I have been working a lot on this product launch for June. It’s meant a lot of later nights and working through lunch. I have been pretty burned...

Over the past few years, people I've worked with have heard me talk at length about my two pillars for building and maintaining high-performing teams. This...

Its been a very stressful and busy last couple weeks leading up to this product launch. I intended to post about my management framework: Predictability, Accoun...

A common occurrence nowadays is businesses complaining about shrinking customer bases, while simultaneously raising prices for everything. Restaurants, theaters...

I've been reflecting on partnerships, both personal and professional. As I evaluate my interactions and categorize them as positive or negative, I've...

April is usually a fast month, but this one was measured in how many 15 minute meetings I could add to my work calendar. Gearing up for a product launch can be...

In 2020, I wrote about my process for staying organized and my goal of keeping things simple. In that post, I outlined several tools I used and how I used them....

Its been a really busy week, so I didn’t get to finish my follow up on staying organized. I promise to publish that one soon.I recently wrote about AI and how I...

In 2020 I wrote a post about journaling and how I benefit from the simple act of writing things down at the end of the day. I’ve talked to a lot of people about...

It seems like this month was only two weeks long. I was on call a lot this month, and that meant staying around the house more, so I got a good amount of readin...

There is a lot of talk about how AI is going to disrupt many industries, and that's true. However, what I'm seeing is companies wanting to hand over a...

Being on call for incidents can be incredibly stressful. You can be paged at any time of day or night, especially because there is a critical system performing...

I work at a large company with many teams, departments, and even sub-properties under the company umbrella. When working on large software projects, it's i...

It's been a pretty stressful few months for me, which has forced me to be intentional about the time I spend on things outside of work. When work is draini...

February was a really tough month for a lot of reasons at work and in personal life, too. Despite the challenges, I started to write about my Notion templates I...

Last week I wrote about how I use Notion to manage my work week and talked a little bit about the way I have my database set up for TODOs and Notes that feed in...

I attribute much of my success to my ability to organize my thoughts, tasks, and notes for future reference. My systems have changed over the years as my duties...

At the end of 2022, as in previous years, I took some time to reflect on the year that had passed. I wrote down my thoughts on what I wanted to achieve in the c...

I'm back to blogging and posting weekly. I had a great start to 2023, reflecting and setting personal and work goals. Despite a rough economic outlook for...

I love to read, and I want to keep notes and other data about the things I read. I wanted a privacy-focused, non-Amazon solution like Goodreads, something fast...

Something that has been helping me reduce my screen time is limiting the number of notifications that reach my screen. After auditing my notification settings,...

A journey of taking control of all the emails, notifications and personal data leakage that has happened over the year, I have been trying to unsubscribe from a...

IntroductionIn October 2022 wanting to rapidly produce some new reports I felt constrained by the code I had mindlessly wrote over the last couple of years. So...

While I have been cleaning up my emails and unsubscribing from as many things as possible, I noticed a recent uptick in amazon notifications coming to my phone....

Every year, I set a goal for number of books and topics to read. This year, my goal was 52 books - or one per week - and topics ranged from the usual scifi to s...

RelaunchIn 2020 I rebuilt my blog and started to post regularly. I wrote about technology I was working on with using Laravel and Tailwind. I wrote tips on how...

I know, not the most original title to a blog. Google has started to roll out a new way to track people across the web, even if you’re not using the immensely p...

A seemingly simple quote from Ron Swanson, of the TV show Parks and Recreation, I think its often easy to think you can do everything. Sometimes it happens slow...

Here we are start of 2021- 2020 was a year that will be remembered as one of the worst in history for many. A global pandemic, a country divided, companies that...

What a month! We had a primary election to decide who would be the next president of the United States and people made their voices heard. More people voted in...

Whats your favorite app on your phone to use daily? Is it because of the design, or the way yo get the information?I think about this frequently, how the design...

Many companies will have end of year reviews for all employees. Its a big production, getting self evaluations, peer reviews and manager reviews. Staple them up...

I can’t believe October is already gone. Its been about 11 months since I saw my family and friends in person.I picked back up my instruments and recording equi...

This week is election week in the US, and I am not putting out a regular piece of content because I need a break away from technology. I have been doom scrollin...

Early in my career I had trouble focusing on building my skill set in a single area. I wanted to do everything. I wanted to design the best looking, trendiest g...

People, teams, companies, relationships all go though hard times. I always think about a quote from Franklin D. Roosevelt."A smooth sea never made a skille...

I have been thinking a lot about privacy in technology. Then I watched Social Dilemma and made me think we are in a little more of a hole than I originally thou...

I don’t hide the fact that I journal. It is an incredibly powerful tool I use everyday that helps me grow, learn and remember things that is going on in the wor...

What a blur, I can’t believe it’s already October. We are just about a month away from the US presidential elections. If you are able to, please exercise your r...

Its been a pretty busy last couple months with ups and downs both at work and in life. It’s easy to feel like the world is crumbling beneath us. The US is on fi...

Stealing the management book name from Michael Scott, of Dunder Mifflin Paper Company, formerly of Michael Scott's Paper Company, I wanted to share my thou...

If you have the luxury of starting a new team, or evolving a team overtime, you might want to try collaborating with the team on a working agreement. I call the...

This month was wrapping up a big project at work. Tying up loose ends and getting some time off. I took an extra long weekend and got away to a secluded area wh...

I want to tell you a little story about why I chose Hover as my domain registrar and a lesson I learned about going above and beyond for customers and potential...

At the end of each 1-1 I ask the same set of questions. No matter where the conversation has taken us, I want to be sure to leave open a couple minutes to ask a...

I stole this question from Lara Hogan who took it from someone else. I think it’s such an awesome question to kick off a new relationship as a manager and I hav...

July was a pretty busy month for me, the weeks seemed to fly by in a blur. But as I think back, I don’t really have any big updates that seem worthy if a monthl...

Despite the obvious reasons of health and exercise, taking a walk outside also helps clear your head and de-stress. Getting fresh air is actually good for you.A...

A couple weeks ago, I wrote a tutorial how to install Tailwind on Laravel. This will be the base of where we add dark mode support to our website.Dark Mode?Like...

You’re only as efficient as the process you employ. When things get stressful and deadlines loom, you should be able to rely on your organizational system to he...

In 2019 I gave a talk about code reviews to the Chicago PHP group. At the time, a part of my job was to facilitate code reviews for my teams and teach good prac...

Monthly I am going to give an overall update on things I’ve been doing. Posts, books, links, and more. It’s been quite a month. It’s been a pretty jarring coupl...

Almost any time I spin up a new laravel app, I also install tailwind to enable me to move fast with my views. What is Tailwindcss?Tailwind is a utility-first CS...

Every year Stack Overflow conducts a developer survey to get the pulse of their community. The questions range from technologies, salary, school and more. Over...

I have flirted with blogging for years, and when I first started coding, I would also blog about my learnings. Its something I fell out of practice with and the...

Along with many others, I have watched SpaceX grow up as a company. Launching rockets into the sky, delivering cargo to the International Space Station, landing...

Recently working on a project where I wanted to have our customers digitally sign a contract, but wanting to confirm the name they input matches the name in the...

Working on some new functionality for an app, I wanted to allow the account admin to create a new user. But by creating a user you need to include a password to...

I have recently been working on an application in Laravel that was using a basic cURL request to grab some information about a url and display that to the users...

This post is part of a study I did during a client presentation at an digital marketing company I worked at in the early 2010s.With cyber threats, cyber terrori...

Over the course of the last couple months, I’ve noticed a huge problem with all my Wordpress sites. They keep crashing! It just didn’t make sense, the css, html...