Writing
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All software is lists
Displaying data to users isn‘t very hard, which makes designing, marketing, and messaging a successful product more difficult. What’s the angle? How is it different than the next thing?
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Breaking good habits
What I’ve learned is that, for me to be productive in writing, I need to both have something on my mind and I need the discipline to tell myself, “okay, now I’m going to write.”
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The product design create-a-player
What is a product designer anyway? What skills do they have? And what makes someone a senior?
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I gave up Scrum and all I got was this immediate sense of relief
You don’t realise how bad incomplete sprints are for team morale until you don’t have to deal with them anymore.
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HTML Crimes
Building a markup linter into the frontend of our local environment to improve semantics and accessibility
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The Developer’s Curse
On my struggle to ignore distractions and create new habits that stick
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Boxed in
Until square companies embrace the blob, otherwise valuable employees will continue to be unsupported, underutilised, and unfulfilled.
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Visualising blog article frequency
Website redesign: Shaming myself into productivity with a JavaScript chart
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What’s with the sheep?
Website redesign: Punk’s not dead, it’s just stuck in the footer
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Fresh coat of paint
Website redesign: Typography, colours, post counts, and some plans
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New content hierarchy
Website redesign: Deciding what’s most important and how to present it. Plus, small feature ideas and a hint about some weird fun.
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Redesigning my website in the open
There’s been a bit of a wave lately of designers redesigning their websites in the open. I thought I’d throw my hat into the ring.
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These People Again
Of all the conference and meetup talks I’ve ever seen, only two standout as truly terrible.
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Democratisation of knowledge in a capitalist industry
Should equal access to information include equal access to guides based on it? To tools or technology built on top of it? To the information in its most convenient form?
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Minimising my environmental impact
Some practical, achieveable changes I pledge to make.
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Case study: Redesigning and refactoring an enterprise web app
How I turned around design and front end as the first product hire of an early stage startup.
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Weeknotes 2019-W19
On ice hockey, admitting you’re related to The Edge from U2, and saying yes.
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In defence of the company group chat
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Table stakes
I asked designers at London tech companies: Does your company offer flexible working hours?
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Telling a company they suck won’t get you hired
The ideal client values your discipline, knows what it costs, and is ready to buy.
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How to audit your LinkedIn connections
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To free or not to free
I’ve been thinking about the apps I use and which ones I pay for. How do I decide who to support?
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Droning on
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Weeknotes 2019-W12
On Sensitive Subjects, conference proposals, and the guilt of taking sick days.
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Sensitive Subjects
A few things I learned about programming while building a small web project.
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Weeknotes 2019-W11
“You shouldn’t just enquire. You should write, too.”
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The Revolutin’ will not be ostracised
Everyone wants to talk about ethics in tech but not as much as they want free stickers.
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The ‘delete account’ button is the message
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How to host better meetings
My seven golden rules to stop wasting everyone’s time.
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A look back at my 2018 resolutions
How I did and how I feel about it.
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What should your hourly rate be as a freelancer?
Take a simple formula, tweak it to work for you, and consider an alternative to selling time.
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How to write Rails comments that don’t appear in rendered HTML
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Southpaw grammar
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Don’t draw shitty Spider-Men
Deadlines are the enemy of quality, but sometimes they’re unavoidable. So what do we do?
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Notes from product owner training
A transcription of all of my notes from a two-day Certified Scrum Product Owner course.
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A Million Email Geeks on a Million Keyboards
Video of my talk about the value of online communities for people working in niche industries and roles.
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All talk
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A certain perfect ratio
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First impressions of Google Contributor
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Right-click, copy link address
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Grid enough
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RSS boys we out here
There’s a perfectly good Twitter alternative right here.
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Solving for (f)
Every once in a while a designer writes an article that totally changes the way I think about something.
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Maintaining your sanity while using Slack
A mostly complete guide to actually getting some work done
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Broken leg
Three things you should do when preparing to speak at a tech event
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Banner year
Recounting the highlights of a successful 2017
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A better placeholder image generator
I built the user interface Placehold.it should have had all along.
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Reasons to pay it forward
It was obvious from 10:00 on Monday that Reasons To wasn’t going to be like the conferences I normally attend.
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Show your hand
It’s rare to see a designer cop to their influences, especially when those influences are their contemporaries.
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How to avoid getting ripped off by a client
Eight steps you need to take on every single project to protect yourself as a freelancer
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Briefly on Briefly
Thoughts on setting the stage for a successful project