Behind the site
Credits
Nothing here came from nowhere. This is what feeds the brain, what turns it into things you can read, and what keeps it all running. None of it is sponsored, and none of it is an endorsement by anyone listed.
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Feeds the brain
Where the ideas and the habits came from.
- Digital Product Management, UVA Darden Taught by Alex Cowan (2021). Personas, problems, alternatives, and testing every idea as a hypothesis.
- Data Scientist with Python, DataCamp The 2020 track. Dataframes, models, and the bootleg version of everything.
- COVID in London Both courses happened working from home, three months away from family. Not a tool, but it made the time.
- Wearing every hat At a small company I was the CTO, ran digital operations and was the CISO, all at once. The argument with myself is where a lot of this writing comes from.
- Delivery, then product Started in software delivery, moved into product and back, with more marketing than I expected.
- People, books and podcasts soon The list is coming. Each will get a line on what it taught me.
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Puts it in motion
What turns a thought into something you can read, watch or download.
- Claude The sparring partner for drafts, edits, videos and building this site. The ideas are mine; we argue, a lot.
- GitHub Every change, the changelog and the private idea inbox live here.
- Vercel Hosting, previews for every change, and the small functions behind hearts, counts and the inbox.
- Astro and Tailwind The framework and the styling.
- Playwright and ffmpeg How the videos and the one-page PDFs get made, frame by frame.
- Cursor then Where this site started.
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Keeps it running
How I know it works, who reads it, and that nothing broke.
- Vercel Web Analytics A cookieless visit count, for everyone.
- Google Analytics Only if you say yes. Which pieces get read and what gets clicked.
- Upstash Stores the counts: roadmap hearts, downloads and "useful" taps. Numbers only.
- Cloudflare The domain name, and nothing else.
- Buttondown The email list, for the longer pieces.
- The switchboard A bootleg integration: I text an idea from my phone, an agent tags it and files it. Held together with webhooks and optimism.
- Audits, in public soon Coming: checking this site the way I would check a company, and publishing what I find once it is fixed.
The loop closes back at step 1: what I learn from running it feeds the next thing. Something missing that should be here? Tell me.