Building for the web & creating durable businesses.

Articles

A caveat to "Consumption Spirals"

Apr 27 2018

Your possessions can end up owning you, a common truism. However you can still find joy in the things you own without succumbing to this fate.

A Moment to Pause

Apr 20 2018

I've enjoyed regularly publishing on this site, but it's distracted me from why I originally decided to write. I take a moment to think about how I can improve this site.

1 percent better

Apr 13 2018

Chasing down success in business and software development with small, incremental improvements.

Creative Class Review

Apr 6 2018

Creative Class is a great course for freelancers wanting to learn about the "other stuff" needed to work for yourself. It's one of the few courses I'd happily pay for again.

Private content with Statamic

Mar 23 2018

I go into more detail on the ways you can protect content and restrict access on a Statamic site.

Analytics vs. User Surveys

Mar 16 2018

User surveys are one of the most valuable things you can start doing if you struggle to make sense of your analytics data.

Build a membership site with Statamic

Mar 9 2018

Creating a private members-only site with Statamic is easy. This tutorial shows you how to protect content, and charge for access to it.

Book Review - 'Deep Work'

Mar 2 2018

This book by Cal Newport is a personal favourite and has had an outsize impact on the way I work. It's one of very few books that I think lives up to it's intention.

Writing about Writing

Feb 27 2018

It's a bit meta, but I spend a few hundred words thinking about how writing can help developers be better, and what that might mean for our profession.

Wordpress to Statamic migration

Feb 14 2018

Writing a bespoke script to migrate the mangled content from a Wordpress site to clean, structured JSON file to import into Statamic.

Does using Google Analytics make sense for your site?

Oct 5 2017

I questioned how this site — along with many others — benefits from having Google Analytics installed to track user behaviour.

Going it alone

Sep 30 2017

After 2 years, I'm leaving Bikesoup and starting a new adventure. I'll be building things, helping people and probably drinking more coffee than is healthy!

Could unmanageable scale create a more sustainable business?

Jul 21 2017

Speculation of Apple's iPhone Pro got me thinking about how the problems created by using cutting-edge technology might impact their business model.

Thoughts on Things' Pricing

May 20 2017

Cultured Code just released Things 3, and it got me thinking about app pricing, and how we could be doing so much better.

Team size as an indicator of success

Jan 6 2017

As we continue on our endless march towards automation, and ultimately A.I, who is best placed to capitalise on our advancements?

Discovering Tachyons

Dec 2 2016

Using functional, single-purpose CSS classes to drastically reduce CSS complexity and update woes.

Why I axed my serverless app

Nov 27 2016

I had built a single page, serverless app with the hottest technologies, and yet I put a bullet in it's head just days before it was ready to launch. Why?