In a recent LinkedIn post, I reshared an article about the "plan mode trap" and expressed some thoughts on the topic. Continuing the thread, this is what explaining the domain looks like in practice Planning doesn't need to be comprehensive, just deliberate. Articulate the desired outcome, name the…
Read more →Over the past couple of years, I've gone from asking AI to generate one-off code snippets to integrating it directly into my day-to-day development flow. Today, Claude Code plays a consistent role in how I build, review, and document features, especially in full-stack projects with multiple layers a…
Read more →In week 2 of Nights & Weekends S5 the focus is on building a "toy version" of the idea I talked about in my recent post. I'm actively building Hausmate an AI chat assistant for millennial homeowners. This week's focus has been on the first iteration of an MVP. Getting something that functions up and…
Read more →Hey folks, going to be a shorter one today - in the middle of Buildspace Nights and Weekends, S5, and working on bringing my idea to life. There are still a lot of great discoveries I made this week on the topics of marketing, Figma's new AI features, and SEO expert advice on the topic of A/B testin…
Read more →I joined Buildspace Nights and Weekends season 5. In case you don't know what it is, it's basically 6 weeks where a group of creative people, each work on building something they truly care about. For S5 I'm building an AI assistant for homeowners called Hausmate. As an example, I'm a homeowner. The…
Read more →A full week last week - Looking at how Google could be punishing SEO, learning about how Perplexity can be used to help create Chrome extensions with limited coding experience, pro marketing tips from expert market Sabri Suby, and more. Let's get into it! - YouTube is experimenting with serverside a…
Read more →This week I’m nerding out on marketing. Not just any kind of marketing but thinking about areas where web development, SEO, and creative ad design overlap. A lot of good stuff this week if you’re into the topic of blending sales and creativity. 1. Last week I finished reading Alex Hormozi’s $100M L…
Read more →A lot of news in the AI space during the past few weeks, especially with Open AI launching GPT4o, and Google I/O’s announcement of Gemini 1.5 Flash. In this issue highlight some helpful links plus some other relevant topics. 1. When doing deep work I enjoy listening to sounds that keep me in a focu…
Read more →April is past - more AI tools, resources, and media consumed. New things to learn and build. Treating these "10 things" style write-ups as an experiment. We'll get the cadence dialed in one of these days. 1. The topic of mastering a craft and pursuing passion is something I spend a lot of time thin…
Read more →As a frontend web developer I have been looking at tools to help improve my design concept and development processes. AI tools are rolling out faster than I can test them but I've tried a few different tools that still amaze me at how well they perform. Starting with web design I discovered Relume w…
Read more →It's been a few weeks... working on some neat things. Playing with a lot of AI tools more recently to help my web design and development processes. So much to learn it's like drinking out of a firehose. As always I'm finding something that piques my interest and sends me down a rabbit hole. Here are…
Read more →I was originally aiming to do these weekly... some ultra pressing to-dos got the best of me the last two weeks. 10 things I found interesting needs to keep going. I've been documenting it in my iPhone's notes app. Let's see if we can do this in 10 minutes. 1. So many young kids using TikTok, should…
Read more →1. 7 things to push me forward a Substack post by Dr. Julie Garner 2. What do Gen-Z and younger millenials care about when it comes to work? Less aiming for the top down executive level work structure or trying to land a spot in the corner office and more about what's fufilling and engaging t…
Read more →Stealing the idea from Austin Kleon's weekly _10 Things Worth Sharing_, each week I'm going to share 10 interesting things I found. My goal here is to keep my creative juices flowing and also boost my blogging activity. 10 Things 1. In my search for ways to improve our design and development at wor…
Read more →I recently realized the need to create a way to spin up the scaffolding of my projects more quickly. With the help of a Devpost article and chatGPT a little package prototype was born. * Here I include an example of this prototype that can be tested as a demo. You can find the repo here or visit a…
Read more →It was a year... a long one. The real thing about it is, there were pleasant moments and unpleasant moments. Thankfully most of the unpleasant moments helped shape me into a better version of myself. That's what matters to me. If you decide to stop reading here... the one thing to take away is, this…
Read more →After some personal life stuff, it was time for me to say goodbye to Twitter (now X... whatever) and I need a place to just drop content I find interesting. So that's what this post is. It's 2023 and the "new cool" according to a recent article I read is giving 0 fucks and not flexing titles or the…
Read more →Everyday I use my phone for all kinds of things, email, music, podcasts, scrolling socials, messaging, maps and so much more… I just saw what Light is doing… founded by Joe Hollier and Kaiwei Tang What if I boxed up my iPhone and put it in a drawer and used the Light phone instead? Maybe I could be…
Read more →For some reason I had no idea this curated product site existed. MSCHF (pronounced _mischief_) is one of those sites that have a very unique UI and it's the reason why I'm jotting these notes. The site (on mobile) features a list of collectible and designer products to choose from, an example is the…
Read more →Reading The Daily Laws by Robert Greene. One of the thoughts that stood out to me this week was the journey to achieving mastery. The road to mastery often begins at zero, not knowing something but choosing to embrace the fact that we will learn through putting in the reps and learning from…
Read more →Tonight I finished reading Andrew Chen's book The Cold Start Problem. And as someone who is on the product team of a startup I gained several applicable insights I'll be mulling over for the next bit. One of the main key takeaways from this book is the subject of network effects, specifically an ato…
Read more →Thinking a lot about leverage and positions in situations. There are two sides of leverage and its best to be on the right side of leverage. An example of this is Farnam Street's recent newsletter #508 where he says the following: _You don’t need to be smarter than others to outperform them if you c…
Read more →We often get asked the question "So What Do You Do?" How do you answer this? Is it concise? What picture does it paint? Clay Hebert hits the nail on the head with starting your intro with "I help..." A response of who you help sets the stage for a dialog and building more human connection. Hebert…
Read more →"It was a great year..." they all start like this. This is not going to be another dry epistle that no-one gives a damn about. Here's my highlights of this year summed up in less than one minute: - I had another birthday - I've been married five years going on six to the love of my life - Our…
Read more →In an ecommerce store, many moving parts ⚙️ are unseen by a seamless user experience. ✅ Control over your inventory system's operations and functionality is imperative to maintaining that 🤝 seamless experience for your customers. 1\. Inventory Tracking 2\. Product Categorization 3\. Barco…
Read more →Today marks exactly 1 month since I quit my sales job of six years to build my web development business. In the last 30 days... I closed $16,300 in sales. I generated $1420 in monthly reoccurring revenue. 3 things that helped me get here: \- Establishing a network before I quit my job. \- Practice a…
Read more →It seems like I’m always getting distracted by having Hacker News my home-screen when I sign on to my browser.
These folks really are building some cool side projects.
Since I’m a book worm Oku caught my eye. They’re aiming to replace Goodreads.
A lot going on… yup I missed posting yesterday and the day before. Flu going around in the family. But here I am back again.
Today working on some designs for the upcoming Developer DAO Web3 Con. This should be fun let’s hope they’re a good fit in the design guild vote.
I really enjoy design. Like a lot. I’m no pro. But there’s nothing like opening up a blank Figma page, cranking up some electronic tunes, and letting the creative juices flow.
Okay... okay... okay. Before you get your defense mode on let me tell you whats up. Since the last half of 2021 I have ben making automated weekly purchases of Bitcoin. Long term HODL. Of course I bought into the FOMO and played the Doge and Shiba Inu token game... but I wasn't serious about those (…
Read more →> Remember how long thou hast been putting off these things, and how often thou hast received an opportunity from the gods, and yet dost not use it. \-Marcus Aurelius Aurelius leaves us with good reminder today from page 9 in Meditations . This page discusses much on the brevity of life and how the…
Read more →Watching 14 Peaks: Nothing is Impossible on tonight and seeing the mental and physical strength that Nimsdai Purja is unreal. The years of preparation, committment, determination and follow through in his mission really is incredible. To break six mountaineering world records in six months is no s…
Read more →Getting design right I should do a poll to figure out how many folks start a design file to simulate the web page before coding it. I have to visualize a product before getting technical with it. Since I'm a newer designer and developer, I spend some time verifying standard specs for what I'm buildi…
Read more →Lately I have had a lot going on and have felt quite overwhelmed. A lot of it is from working a full time retail sales job. The transition stage from leaving the full time gig to go into freelancing full time has been a challenge. Finding a way to divide my time into the proper channels has been…
Read more →A pretty great Monday for the first one of 2022. Kicked the morning off early with french pressed coffee, The Six Minute Diary and reading a page of Meditations by Marcus Arelius. Priming the brain with gratitude and philosophy makes for a great day. Yesterday I took some life objectives and journal…
Read more →Sometimes the greatest excuses that we make for not executing is because of obstacles in the way. Eliminating the obstacle in the way of execution prevents legitimate excuses. Real life example: The obstacle: _I don't always have access to my MacBook._ The solution: _Use the native browser version o…
Read more →It's been quite the year. A year where I learned a lot about myself, my wife, and my child. They are the most important to me. I'm aggressive when testing my limits and pushing myself deeper into personal development. Life is like a game, an obstacle course of sorts. Today I remember the old PC game…
Read more →More and more we are hearing the word “DAO.” What does it stand for?
DAO stands for decentralized automated organization. There is no central leadership and decisions are made through proposals and community votes.
Here’s the run down in a nutshell.
This week I completed my first Five Minute Journal. A Journal to help folks focus on gratitude, greatness, affirmations, and self-improvement. Every day for the past 6 months I documented snippets of my life. It positively impacted my daily outlook on life to start by writing for 2 minutes each morn…
Read more →Matt Sephton, has the incredible skill of playing around with Apple tech, like turning an iPad Pro into a classic Macintosh.
Stephton has launched 11 apps on the App Store and lists 34 additional projects he’s come up with. His portfolio section is pretty amazing and definitely worth checking out.
_I took 12 days to learn more about the Agile Manifesto's 12 principles...._ What caught me off guard was how little I have heard about these principles being talked about among newer developers and boot camp grads. Many folks learning web development (myself included) fail to realize that being a g…
Read more →Let’s talk about Git... No matter what coding language you use to build a project, the project needs to be tracked and documented. How do we do this? We use Git. Git is an open source version control system used to help track our code, make changes, and contribute to existing projects. ✅ Think about…
Read more →While scrolling through Twitter I saw a tweet thread by Vaidehi Joshi (lead software engineer at forem) on the topic of how the best engineers are "extremely skilled communicators." It got me thinking... It's not only about having knowledge and skills that are valuable, but being able to demonstrate…
Read more →Are you hung up on front end design when building a web app? Figuring out how to write CSS was a challenge for me when I was learning backend heavy languages/frameworks, such as, Python or Django. Until I found out… 👀 You can use the following to make life much easier 🔗 Bootstrap 🔗 Tailwind CSS…
Read more →Jim Rhon's most used one line quote is: _You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with_ In today's reading of The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday, he challenges us to ask ourselves about the people we spend our time with. _Are they making me better?_ _Do they encourage me to push f…
Read more →_There's a lot of talk right now about "headless cms" and there are reason's why so many folks are using this approach, including myself! An example of it is the blog you are reading right now._ _Here is what it is in a nutshell presented by Sam Sycamore 🌰_ _Read on to understand more about the use…
Read more →What is an open source project? In a nutshell, an open source project is one in which the code to the project is available online through a code hosting platform such as Github or Bitbucket where developers can upload, share, edit, and delete code (avoiding technical terms at the moment). How do I g…
Read more →Why Keep It Up To Date? As a professional or entrepreneur, there are a few reasons why it is super important to maintain your LinkedIn profile. 1. It is a page to showcase your work and tell people who you are 2. Your actions on LinkedIn have a very large reach (Your activity is public) 3. If you…
Read more →Building with tools I haven't used before Today is the beginning of my next major project, an e-commerce store. The plan is to learn more about React but also a few other tech stacks I've been curious about for a long time. With the help of SimpleTut's new 24 video tutorial series, let's do this! 🧰…
Read more →Amazon CEO Steps Down In the recent news of Bezos stepping down to take the role of executive chairman, a lot of folks are asking "why?" In an email earlier this week Bezos says: _“Being the CEO of Amazon is a deep responsibility, and it’s consuming. When you have a responsibility like that, it’s ha…
Read more →To Be Generalized or Specified In a recent video Tim Ferriss discusses the topic: "Should You Specialize or Be a Generalist?" He talks about the time he asked Scott Adams for some career advice (artist of the well-known Dilbert comics) and it's interesting to see Adams' perspective on this one. Adam…
Read more →Intentional Objectives It's the first day of February today, I feel great! Up at 5 AM, doing my morning stretch routine, meditating, writing in the 5 Minute Journal, drinking two glasses of H20 and sipping piping hot green tea (of course). Before diving head on into my work, I decided a new monthly…
Read more →My Musings on Stoicism This morning in day 29 of The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday the title is "Keep it Simple", Marcus Aurelius talks about maintaining a "sturdy" mind when on a task, more specifically he says: > ...approach each task as if it is your last, giving up every distraction... You can see…
Read more →The Intro What's up? This is the first blog post in a series of hundreds to come(I should say thousands more). I'm Josh, family man, husband, dad, and builder on the internet. Some Background Yup I said that already I'm a "family man", I live in a small North Carolina town with my wife and daughter.…
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