Ask Me Anything

It is! Check out the repo

Recognition (see: ego) is one of my main motivators right now. I eagerly await the day where I stop giving a shit.

I believe in "just in time learning" - most stuff you read online is rarely needed in the moment, often misremembered, and easily forgotten. When a problem is in front of you, dive in to learn what you need to overcome the problem. Ignore the noise.

Most people are fine building mediocre software. Don't be a person who is fine building mediocre software. Strive for excellence in every aspect of what you do, the rest will follow.

At many points where I found myself inwardly focused - for example, asking how I could get a promotion or climb the ladder - I turned that energy outwards to trying to solve business or team needs. This approach has worked out for me so far. Read more about the principal-agent problem, it's a life changing mental shift.

Whoever this is - wow, wild that you know this! I'm really proud that some of the writers who volunteered on the team ended up with jobs in the music industry, are managing artists, and doing big things with their careers. That's so rewarding.

If I could have done it differently, I would have spent less time on merch, doubled down on quality over quantity, and continued investing in a product-oriented approach to music discovery, rather than continuing to run the flat blog structure that was the original backbone.

The fact that nothing comes immediately to mind is ... surprising, I suppose. I don't know that I've read a lot of designy design books.

Spend time trying to fundamentally understand the software that you think looks good, feels good, or solves problems in elegant ways. Forcing yourself to articulate why something looks good, or "feels right" will make you notice things like typography hierarchy, color, spacing, iconography, copywriting, animation, haptics/sounds, and more.

Then start doing this for software you feel is bad. Why is it bad? How would you make it better?

Yearly notes + quarterly reviews for personal stuff, and then for work things I just try to follow through on the things I said I was going to do on each previous performance review.

Embarrassingly, I slowed down a lot in the back half of this year. At the beginning of the year when I was spending time there, the motivation was high and activation energy required to dip in was low. But now that travel is a unknown thing of the future, it's hard to activate the learning mode on any given day.

It's a custom Next.js app - the code is here

The team. I get to work with some really great engineers who respect design and love to make things look + feel great to use. That's my happy place!

Tokyo, any time.

There aren't enough posts to need tag organization yet! Maybe if I have a lot of public writing on here someday, it will make sense.

That Cowgirl Creamery triple-cream soft cheese, or whatever it's called. Bless that cheese.

Started from scratch! But it's also a bunch of components, colors, and styles I've been slowly iterating on over the years, so there was a bit of a personal foundation.