Latest Writing

Silent Craig My default reaction when politics comes up in conversation is to be uncomfortable. Even if the person I'm talking to agrees with me, it doesn’t change my reaction much. I'm only at ease with the few people I regularly talk to about politics that mostly come with a curious and open mind. This doesn’t make for a lot of pleasant back and forth in any election year, much less this one. I…

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Before I read Principles: Life and Work, I knew next to nothing about Ray Dalio or Bridgewater Capital. A few key recommendations in the past couple of years finally nudged the book to the top of my stack. The timing to wrestle with the contents of his book couldn’t have been more relevant to me especially over the last four months. I finished reading it the first time a few days before the US…

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I wish we lived in a world where this didn’t need to be said. But, the facts on the ground make it necessary to be clear: I believe black lives matter, and they deserve the same right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness many of us take for granted. I’m making a commitment to put thought and intention into what I can do so that hopefully my infant son doesn’t have to think about whether…

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My “system” is the label I use for the tools, documents, and habits that I rely on to help me live closer to the life I want to be living. Ohhhh, the system. I've built this system over time to clearly understand and live up to what I am committed to. I use it as a framework for my day to day, as well as to help me know when I should not commit to something new or when to clearly renegotiate…

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I've wanted to refresh this website for quite some time. The last time I rebuilt and redesigned it was in 2013. The look and feel had gone a bit stale, and my lack of keeping up with updates to the static site generator I was using made it near impossible for me to post to the site without hours of tinkering. Lots of post ideas came and went. I could have posted to medium or linkedin or…

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I had a great time going on the Better Product Podcast. I got to talk with two people I have a lot of respect and admiration for about things that I really love doing and advocating for in digital product development. Anna and Christian are great interviewers, and their segment after my appearance is really helpful too. The entire Innovatemap team are pros and have been my teachers and partners…

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Recently as Slack has continued its rise as a primary tool for people to communicate, there's been a bit of a backlash against some of the behaviors that result. One person sent their dear John letter, 37Signals' Jason Fried shared his strong opinion on the subject, and Ars Technica also released a more comprehensive piece on Slack centered workplaces from a more observational point of view. All…

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Everybody's first pedal for like 20 years It's no secret that there's an ongoing, accelerating proliferation of tools for makers of software, especially if you write code. New and evolving programming languages, frameworks, libraries, databases, PaaS offerings, and more show up seemingly every day. Some of us are energized by this explosion and chase the bleeding edge. Some ignore it as much as…

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I've had the occasion to be doing a lot of reflection on the past year and a half recently, on helping start a business, on running a development team, on being the primary person in charge of managing a product - all things I had never really done completely on my own before. I've tried to focus on mainly on crystallizing what I've learned from those experiences, but the question "what do you…

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Among the first things taught to students studying physics are Newton's three laws of motion, the first of which (paraphrased) is that an object in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force. Many people struggle with being a starter and not a finisher on any number of projects, and can't keep things in motion. Countless github profiles are just like mine on the public…

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We've been using slack at Haven since before I made the first commit to our code repository, and it is a revelation. It deserves every glowing bit of coverage it has received. Given the opportunity, I would invest in them, even at their headline grabbing valuation. The way they've stood on the shoulders of IRC and even HipChat to bring group chat from the super technical crowd to the rest of…

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