Writing

Paying dividends

How I spurred the Litmus design team to adopt Figma

It’s okay not to speak

There are countless people quietly going about their professional lives who are satisfied by just doing their jobs.

Death by a thousand cuts

I committed an API key and all I got was this irreparable integration.

Never forget where you came from

An observation on my subconscious attempt to assimilate with the engineering department

Recovering commits after git reset goes wrong

I worked on the wrong branch all day and it only got worse from there.

TIL: Commit messages, SCSS in custom properties, and propagating Monstera

Maybe leave the facepalm emoji out of the commit message next time.

How I’m spending my autumn vacation

Details of updates to my Jekyll site relating to post categories, RSS, and content management

Things I like

A living, growing list of little things I like

Redrawing resized illustrations for pixel perfection

Sometimes it‘s the little things.

Living Litmus values

Quotes from my coworkers about how I ‘collaborate with bias to action’ and ‘take it to heart.’

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?

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.”

The product design create-a-player

What is a product designer anyway? What skills do they have? And what makes someone a senior?

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.

HTML Crimes

Building a markup linter into the frontend of our local environment to improve semantics and accessibility

The Developer’s Curse

On my struggle to ignore distractions and create new habits that stick

Visualising blog article frequency

Website redesign: Shaming myself into productivity with a JavaScript chart

What’s with the sheep?

Website redesign: Punk’s not dead, it’s just stuck in the footer

Fresh coat of paint

Website redesign: Typography, colours, post counts, and some plans

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.

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.

These People Again

Of all the conference and meetup talks I’ve ever seen, only two standout as truly terrible.

Minimising my environmental impact

Some practical, achieveable changes I pledge to make.

Weeknotes 2019-W19

On ice hockey, admitting you’re related to The Edge from U2, and saying yes.

In defence of the company group chat

Table stakes

I asked designers at London tech companies: Does your company offer flexible working hours?

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.

How to audit your LinkedIn connections

Droning on

Weeknotes 2019-W12

On Sensitive Subjects, conference proposals, and the guilt of taking sick days.

Sensitive Subjects

A few things I learned about programming while building a small web project.

Weeknotes 2019-W11

“You shouldn’t just enquire. You should write, too.”

The Revolutin’ will not be ostracised

Everyone wants to talk about ethics in tech but not as much as they want free stickers.

The ‘delete account’ button is the message

A look back at my 2018 resolutions

How I did and how I feel about it.

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.

How to write Rails comments that don’t appear in rendered HTML

Southpaw grammar

Notes from product owner training

A transcription of all of my notes from a two-day Certified Scrum Product Owner course.

All talk

A certain perfect ratio

First impressions of Google Contributor

Right-click, copy link address

Grid enough

RSS boys we out here

There’s a perfectly good Twitter alternative right here.

Solving for (f)

Every once in a while a designer writes an article that totally changes the way I think about something.

Maintaining your sanity while using Slack

A mostly complete guide to actually getting some work done

Broken leg

Three things you should do when preparing to speak at a tech event

Banner year

Recounting the highlights of a successful 2017

A better placeholder image generator

I built the user interface Placehold.it should have had all along.

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.

Show your hand

It’s rare to see a designer cop to their influences, especially when those influences are their contemporaries.

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

Briefly on Briefly

Thoughts on setting the stage for a successful project