one time someone gave me a compliment that “[my iOS app’s] sheet physics were perfect” (if you know, you know)

i was flattered, but the truth was actually cooler than mimicking the physics perfectly.

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Three years ago, I joined a scrappy Series A startup named Commonstock. The journey was full of twists and turns I never could have anticipated: we navigated the sudden run on SVB (our bank at the time), the dramatic end of the ZIRP era, and waves of tech layoffs reshaping the industry.

Despite these headwinds, we found a path forward when Yahoo Finance acquired Commonstock nearly two years ago. Transitioning overnight¹ from a tight-knit team of fewer than 20 people to becoming part of one of the internet’s oldest and most iconic companies was an experience I’ll never forget.

At Yahoo Finance, I’m incredibly proud of the work we accomplished — especially launching social features² that encourage investors of all backgrounds to connect, learn, and grow together. Seeing a vibrant community begin to flourish on such an established platform reinforced my belief in the power of community-driven products.

But startup life has been calling me back. The opportunity to build from the ground up, rapidly iterate, and directly impact users (and the business) at scale is hard to resist.

So, today was my last day at Yahoo Finance. I’ll be taking a couple weeks off to reset, and then I’m excited to be joining the team at Whatnot! 🥳🎉

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The simpler it is to write and publish content to your website, the more likely it is that you will. I don’t make the rules, that’s just human nature.

Most of the time I write on my MacBook, but there’s no technical reason preventing me from publishing from my iPad or iPhone, it just requires some setup the first time.

Today I picked up the new 13” iPad Pro and the matching Magic Keyboard, so I figured it was a great time to publish a little article from the new mobile setup with my first impressions of the new hardware and the apps I use to write on the go.

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There has been a lot of press around changes to the App Store lately.

First there was a US court decision that forced Apple into allowing apps to include an “alternate payment link”, and just yesterday they announced a sweeping set of changes coming to the EU App Store due to the Digital Markets Act (DMA) that is scheduled to come into effect in March.

Both of these legally mandated changes are being implemented in such a way as to do the absolute bare minimum required and make everyone who decides to use the new options pay for it.

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Update: This post is out of date, as I decided to return the Air and keep my 16" M1 Pro MacBook Pro instead. When it came time to mail my trade-in, I couldn’t part with it, it’s still such an awesome machine. Maybe sometime in the future I’ll revisit the Air. I’m leaving the post up because it’s still accurate information, but I no longer have the machine.

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I side-graded my 2021 16" MacBook Pro to the 15" MacBook Air. I’ve been doing a bit more travel lately, and I’m getting tired of lugging the bigger 16" beast around with me. The smaller machine is a tradeoff in a few areas compared to the Pro, but it shaves 1.4lbs (0.59kg) of weight off, is significantly thinner, and slightly smaller.

I haven’t had the opportunity to take a trip with it yet, but in some trial runs throwing it in my backpack, the difference is already feeling nice.

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It’s been about a year and a half since I wrote my last home office post and while much of it has stayed the same, I’ve updated and moved things around quite a bit and felt it was time to write about my current setup and share some new pictures.

I’ve been working remotely since mid-2016 – now in my eighth year. The majority of that time I was working for Bleacher Report/Turner Sports, then remotely for Apple¹ before joining a startup named Commonstock. After a little over a year at Commonstock, we were acquired by Yahoo² where I now work as a principal software engineer on the Yahoo Finance iOS app.

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as we approach the first birthday of our dog Dutch, i wanted to look back on our time with him as a puppy with fondness and appreciation for what he’s taught us and the many fun things we’ve done with him.

in june of last year we decided to bring a puppy home. we had been talking about getting a dog at some point, then one day i ran into an old friend at the gym who had some puppies available from their litter of goldendoodles. we really weren’t planning on getting a puppy right then, but we saw this cute little ball of fluff with his unique silver and black coat and we fell in love. after a lot of discussion over a couple days we decided to take the plunge into puppy fueled depression and sleep deprivation.

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i haven’t written about my new app Albums on this site, which is a little bit intentional and a little bit of an oversight. let me explain.

i don’t know who reads this blog. intentionally. i have no analytics, no email subscription list, nothing. if i had to guess, the number of people that read any given article is more than five and less than one hundred. i’m not sure if that’s me being dismissive of my own reach or trying to be somewhat realistic about the deluge of content we wade through every day.¹

so back to not writing about my new app here. it’s a bit of an oversight because this is my “official” website. it’s the one that bears my name and the one that has some reasonably important announcements on it. it should probably contain at least some reference to my first indie iOS app in over a decade. as for it being intentional, i don’t consider the app to be “finished” yet. it’s still missing functionality that i desperately wanted to put into the first release, but somehow convinced my perfectionistic ADHD brain to push below the line. i stubbornly didn’t want to announce the app in a long-form post until it was “ready”.

but that’s kinda silly since as we’ve established: i’m not sure if any significant number of people read this blog and even if they do, is an app ever truly finished? i may be waiting a long time.

so without further delay: i shipped version 1.0 (and 1.1) of my first indie app in over 12 years. it’s called Albums, and it’s one of the things i’m most proud of building.

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I’ve been through this “new year” thing a few times. Not as many as some, but more than others. The last few years I’ve gravitated toward “themes” instead of listing a bunch of unrelated goals/wishes. That way when I list out any specific goals, it becomes more about listing actionable steps to support a singular goal instead of a bunch of things I need to keep in my head throughout the year. keep reading →

I’ve been drawing a lot of inspiration from Steve Jobs recently. One quote that’s been bouncing around my head quite a bit is this one from 1983:

“It’s better to be a pirate than to join the navy.”

I’m sure there were many meanings tucked away inside that simple phrase, but the story I’ve seen attributed to Andy Hertzfeld (who was at Apple in 1983) centers around resisting the bureaucratic nonsense that was increasing in the Mac group at Apple as they were growing. Don’t give up your scrappy, win-at-all-costs, counter-culture identity just to conform to “the system”.

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