I'm Writing Again
I can’t believe it’s been over two years since I last published an article here! Time really flies. The crazy part is that over these last two years, I’ve...
Does Music Help You Focus?
I’ve always been the sort of person who works with music in the background. Ever since I was a little kid writing code in my bedroom, I’d routinely listen to...
Real Estate vs Stocks
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a bit of a personal finance nerd. I’ve been carefully tracking my spending and investing for many years now. In particular, I...
Journaling: The Best Habit I Picked Up in 2021
2021 was a challenging year in many ways. Other than the global pandemic, many things changed in my life (some good, some bad), and it was a somewhat...
How to Calculate the Energy Consumption of a Mac
I’m a bit of a sustainability nerd. I love the idea of living a life where your carbon footprint is neutral (or negative) and you leave the world a better...
How I Converted a REST API I Don't Control to GraphQL
I’ve been building and working with REST APIs for many years now. Recently, however, I’ve been spending more and more of my time working with (and building)...
The Feature Snowball
The “feature snowball”, as I like to call it, is a product and time management technique I’ve been successfully implementing for the last 10 years or so....
Defensive Finance in a Downturn
I live in the bay area of the United States in a suburb of San Francisco. At the time of writing, I’ve been in isolation from the world for roughly 3 weeks,...
Don't Waste Time Getting Feedback
Time is valuable. In fact, time is the single most valuable thing any of us have. That’s why I think it’s so important not to waste time if you don’t have...
The Only Type of API Services I'll Use
I love API services. It still feels magical each time I query an endpoint and get back some interesting data or cause some complicated functionality to...
My Personal Financial Strategy
I’ve always been fascinated by money: how people earn it, spend it, and invest it. What fascinates me most about personal finance is how personal it is....
Please Stop Using Local Storage
Seriously. Just stop it already. I don’t know what it is, exactly, that drives so many developers to store session information in local storage, but whatever...
How EU Cookie Law Myths Affect Web Security
Over the last few years you might have noticed banners like this one popping up on a lot of web pages: These banners are a direct result of the passage of...
To 30 Billion and Beyond
Several years ago I created a free web service, ipify. ipify is a freely available, highly scalable ip address lookup service. When you query its REST API,...
How to Monetize Your Website with Cryptocurrency Mining
I’m a big fan of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies. They have a number of interesting applications, one of which I’ll be discussing today:...
Authentication Still Sucks
I currently own 47 domain names. I know it sounds like a lot, but that’s down quite a bit from my all-time high of 78 ~two years ago. I’m constantly thinking...
Too Busy
For the last handful of years I’ve been too busy to do a lot of things. Too busy to launch new products on my free time, too busy to go on trips for fun, and...
I Don't Give a Shit About Licensing
Every now and then I’m reminded of just how much I hate software licensing. Instead of doing what I normally do and silently complaining to myself, I figured...
Obsessing Over Availability is Dumb
Over the past handful of years, as I’ve been building and working on several very large and very public API services, I’ve noticed that almost everyone I...
Two Years of Evangelism
In a couple short months, I’ll have been at Stormpath for two full years. It’s pretty insane how fast the time has flown by. It seems like only yesterday I...