At a company party recently a friend (hello Emma!) asked me how I keep things interesting with my wife after marriage. “How do you not get bored of each other?” Presumably, she wasn’t just asking about stuff in the bedroom. It’s a question that I never really asked myself but it’s certainly an…

Simple is easier to understand. Simple is easier to remember. Dogs are simple. Simple things are always more beautiful. Simple is harder to break. Simple things load faster. In a complex world, simple is rare and appreciated. Simple is the culmination of clear thinking and action. Simple is closer…

Every time I visit the dentist I seem to learn something new. This time, I learned that you’re supposed to floss before you brush! Who would have known that? Ok, maybe you did… when I heard the logic plainly explained to me, it made perfect sense. Floss first so you dislodge the things stuck between…

Marketing is one of the key drivers of consumerism. It has been since humans first had things to sell to one another, beginning with simple signs in the town market. But modern consumerism is a beast compared to a physical market. It’s obvious when you look at the continual growth of mega sales…

Any useful piece of software is bound to have bugs. A corner case wasn’t thought of. Some user has found creative ways to use your tool that you couldn’t have come up with yourself. Whatever the case, things inevitably break in software. But who’s fault is it if a user does something with your tool…

I’ve just spent 12 hours straight coding at work. Combined with the last couple of weeks of coding, sometimes late into the evening, I’m close to exhaustion. It was hard to even bring myself to look at the screen to write this post. While I’m obviously tired of/from coding right now, I’m also…

YouTube video link Here’s a fantastic animated film about habits that was recently recommended in my YouTube feed. This got me thinking about my own struggle with habits. Habits that I have that I’m proud of: Working out 3 times a week Writing and publishing a blog post daily Brushing twice and…

ECMAScript 2015 (or ES6 as it’s more popularly known) is now mainstream and supported in all major browsers. With that, destructuring becomes a standard feature of JavaScript. Before describing how you can use it, let’s talk about why destructuring is a useful feature of a programming language. What…

Black Friday and Cyber Monday have in recent years become quite the sales holiday. Marketers for retail brands drum up interest one to two weeks leading up to Friday, and consumers have mostly learned to lap it all up and decide where not whether to hand over their credit cards. But Black Friday is…

Someone in Smartly.io recently shared with the company this article on how an outdoor equipment brand, Backcountry, managed to give such fantastic customer service that their reps get invited to customers’ weddings. That title alone drew me in. Turns out, it wasn’t just click bait. This 20-minute…

Just two or three years ago, I tried rock climbing for the first time. It was fun, but I couldn’t get too high, otherwise, my legs would start becoming wobbly and my heart would want to rip open a hole and jump out of my chest. Height has never been a friend. I tried rock climbing one more time…

First sale for ang veil yú Eleven days after launching our online wedding veil shop, we’ve made our first sale. What a wonderful day! The customer is actually one of my wife’s bridal clients who’s about to get married in December. She bought a piece of our lace-trimmed elbow-length veil, one of…

“When was the last time you listened to the seat belt announcement on an airplane? We ignore it because we’ve been trained to ignore it.” Seth Godin brings up a good point. If we can associate your message with a wider pattern of messaging, we’re likely to ignore it. As a marketer of a new company…

Marketing is a really big domain of expertise. Just ask Seth Godin - he’s been studying and practising it his entire career, and he’s still learning every day! (He blogs about them daily on his blog.) Before starting ang veil yú with my wife, I’d never really given marketing any special attention or…

At some point in your programming career, you will come to a fork in the road to choose between code readability or efficiency. Which do you choose? Take the example of an array of objects. Let’s say this was the data you expect to be returned from an internal API. Because it’s an internal API, you…

What is the real reason a user is unwilling to use a feature of your product? Let’s say you’re trying to help an existing enterprise customer learn about and try to use a new feature your product team has just rolled out - say, Video Templates for creating video ads at scale. It’s a shiny new thing…

If you’re the developer of an app that needs to pull large files from other servers, during testing or development, you may have wanted to partially download a very large file so you don’t have to wait for the full, potentially hour-long download to finish. This is especially true for CSV/TSV files…

A Google Slides deck can be used as a simple wireframing tool for a planned app. If your intent is to encapsulate what the app can do, a black and white wireframe done with shapes and text in a PowerPoint deck is enough. Sometimes, it may even be more effective without the colours to distract! There…

In the office today, one of my colleagues was using LinkedIn ads and found a glitch. Somehow, his teammate in the marketing team based in Helsinki was able to see the performance statistics of the ads we were running, but he wasn’t. There are several plausible explanations for this behaviour: My two…

Not us. But I’m digging the vibes! I received an interesting message from a friend who recently saw my update on social media about my new business with my wife. I believe he said we were such a “power couple”. I find it interesting because, from the outside, people who run businesses may certainly…