Ask Me Anything

Snack and watch TV.

I referred to this tutorial and made some minor modifications to the code.

I have! I wrote about what I've learned so far if that's helpful 😊

Well you spooked me by even asking this! I just deployed a change that adds rate limiting to all requests against my GraphQL API. Thanks for the nudge 😊

That's a good idea, I should poke at that! The furthest I went with exploring ways to quickly add a bookmark was I actually set up a Twilio phone number that let me text a URL and it would receive the text, process it, and grab all the metadata and save it to Firebase. And I used it a few times and then ended up just stopping. Now I kind of just do it manually through the interface I have on my website.

But yeah, it could be fun to poke at shortcuts or something else. Maybe even just building like a local app. Good idea!

I don't know, every framework has pros and cons. I really like Tailwind, I switched over to that last year, I suppose. It's really made it fast and easy to just style the interface and do a lot of responsive variants and handle dark mode. It's really cool!

I'm a big fan, so maybe poke at that.

I might lose points for this, but I don't read that many design books. I'm trying to remember any design books that really stand out and nothing is coming to mind. Yeah, sorry. Maybe that's not a good thing.

Thanks! It's kind of a mishmash of stuff, but all the code is open source, so feel free to poke around. But the writing page is powered by Ghost. The Hacker News page is powered by some Hacker News API. Some of the other pages, like the Stack page or the Bookmarks page are either hard coded or they're just like talking to Firebase. I don't know, it's all kind of a mess, but that's part of the fun!

One of my recent articles is called How to Give a Great Product Design Portfolio Presentation, and that basically captures all of my thoughts and opinions on what makes a strong presentation. So let me know if anything is missing in there. Feel free to tweet at me or ask another question. Hope it helps!

I think that's mostly an illusion. There's many multi-month gaps in between when I publish blog posts. I think the number one thing that I do regularly is publish the podcast, and we just have a schedule for that. Every Monday we record.

And once you get into that habit, it's pretty easy, but otherwise, GitHub is definitely friendly to side projects. Everything here is pretty much nights, weekends, that kind of thing. And it happens slowly and over a long period of time.

I use three. The first is Loom. Loom has a nice feature that lets you record your face overlaid on top of the video, and it's really better at getting a URL. So if I need to share a URL with somebody, that's the right tool. But I also use CleanShot and Kap, and both of those have different strengths.

I think CleanShot is better just quickly getting a video onto my clipboard and Kap is better exporting gifs. So I bounce between those three.

No, not quite. They get sent to me by email and then I have to record or write an answer before they get published for everyone else to see.

Yeah, Mailbrew is awesome! I needed a break from Twitter a while ago. I had this tension where I wanted to take a break from the doom scrolling but not miss any highlights, because Twitter is where a lot of people announce major life changes or job changes or location changes. So I didn't want to miss that.

Mailbrew has this feature where you can get a daily digest of the top tweets from people you follow or the most shared links from people that you follow. So I just turn that on, and now every day at five PM I get this digest of the highlights so I don't feel like I've missed anything. It's actually helped me stay off Twitter a lot more, and I highly recommend it. So great job to the Mailbrew team!

I haven't gotten GraphCDN working because I can't figure out authentication, but once I figure that out I will definitely use it!

Yeah, good question! I'm actually not sure that I'm not also crashing browsers on mobile 😛 But one thing that you could poke at is adding some kind of intersection observer so that the videos don't even render until they enter the viewport (or at least until they're about to enter the viewport). That might reduce a lot of load on the browser and prevent you from downloading unused resources before the end user needs them.

By the way, this site is open source! I don't know if you saw that, but feel free to poke through there and good luck 😊

This question prompted me to write a full blog post. But the tl;dr of it is really just helping with product and design feedback. A lot of early stage founders are looking for gut checks on decisions or need help thinking through design problems.

The other big bucket of things is helping with hiring (not recruiting), like reviewing portfolios or hopping on calls with candidates or helping set up a design interview process. All of those things have ended up being really helpful.

On the edges, helping make more introductions to investors or other advisors, or in some specific cases being a user of the product and giving them actual product feedback as a customer has been useful.

Anyways, I wrote a whole lot about that. Please post any follow up questions if anything else comes to mind!