Things written and spoken.

Though I wasn't forward-thinking enough to keep an archive of my most epic Basecamp threads, here are a few things I've written, spoken, and illustrated.

The Developer’s Code: A book on developer life

I love the idea of “selling your by-products.” Thanks Rework!

About 15 years ago, I curated a number of blog posts I had written over the prior decade and created a web-based book about the life of a software developer. (Apparently, I love making web-based books!) I shopped it around for a year until the Pragmatic Bookshelf took a chance on it. It was published in 2012.

A few chapters from the book:

• Introduction
• The “Ivory Tower” Architect
• The Simplicity Paradox

Real Code Series: Talking through my design and development thought-process

While writing is the communication form I've spent the most time practicing, occasionally, I like to explain things in front of a camera. Here are three videos from a series I produced on DoneDone called “Real Code” that go into small details of my UI, UX, and development thought-process.

How do you store sort? Though this has to do more with server-side thinking, my most popular video is one about how I store Kanban sort order in the database. This was a major technical hurdle I had to get through in the Kanban board I built for DoneDone. See it here.

Stories of DoneDone: Tales of joy, fear, reservation and pride during the making of our issue tracker

In 2017, as I was about to embark on DoneDone as a full-time job, I wrote a series of essays reflecting on the first 8 years. This went beyond design and development and into other parts of building a product.

A piece on my web design career

Last year, I wrote a long piece on Medium, digging up all my past web work on the Wayback Machine. I was writing it to no one but myself. But much to my surprise, it became a “staff pick” on Medium. You can see my a lot of my pre-DoneDone work here as well.

A few of my favorite essays

While I mainly write about design and development, I've also written about other topics— fatherhood, sports, domestic life to name a few. I've pulled out a few of my favorites from my complete list of 100+ blog posts and essays.

Three essays about design and development:

1. On my design process using code as the medium
2. On comparing a software designer to a musician
3. On the good and bad side of coding bootcamps (from 2014)

Three essays not about design nor development. The latter two showcase some of my own drawings, which I occasionally do with an Apple Pencil on my daughter's iPad when she's at school.

1. On the satisfaction of watching your kids get better than you
2. On cutting a watermelon so you can store the rest in the fridge
3. On making a red sauce

I hope what I've shared on these pages gives you a good sense of my work, joy for the craft, sense of aesthetics, thought-process, and excitement about this position at 37signals.