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Wild discovery: my Twitter account is algorithmically broken. With 11k followers, my posts average about 200 views (1.8% reach). The exact same content on Threads, where I have a little over 470 followers, routinely gets 3k+ views (638% reach), often reaching even more people and getting 25k or even 100k+ views. This tells me that the content isn't the issue. So, backstory. I grew this 𝕏 account to about 20k followers between 2007-2015 when things were arguably a bit different. Then I went on autopilot for a few years (I know, my bad), just posting links and not interacting much. I came back 2-3 months ago, removed 9k dead followers, started posting daily, engaging constantly. Still stuck in the same 200-views prison. Ain't nobody got time for that. My tweets show in search, so I'm not shadowbanned. Just... ignored. Only the same 150-200 people ever see my content (I appreciate you very much🧸) In the spirit of documenting things in public I figured I'd document the recovery attempt: removing another 4k inactive followers to get down to 7k. I'm pretty sure this won't do anything though. Sometimes you have to admit the engine is blown. The irony? Only about 200 of you will even see this tweet. If you see me interact via a new account, no surprises, you know why. If you do see this very post, consider yourself part of the exclusive 1.8% club 📊 And if this resonates, feel free to like, repost, and share. It'd be nuts if this broke through 😅

Just some things I believe to be true when it comes to building for the web: • Accessibility isn’t optional • Typography > everything else • One VPS > your k8s cluster • 1,000 fans > 100k ghosts • Revenue > vanity metrics • Profit > Revenue • Bootstrap > VC brain damage • Ship simple > plan complex • Fix bugs > add features • Loyal users > new signups • Page speed > fancy animations • Craft CMS > WordPress • Tailwind works but we all look the same now • The web is incredible and terrible • Edge computing is for 1% of apps • Most sites need better content, not better tech • Your startup doesn’t need microservices • Performance > aesthetics (but why not both) • Semantic HTML > div soup • Progressive enhancement still matters • Cache everything, invalidate carefully • SQLite until it breaks (it probably won’t) • Server-side rendering > SPA by default • HTML forms work fine actually • Your users don’t care about your tech stack • Most sites don’t need a build process • CSS Grid solved layout • Loading spinners all suck • Nobody reads terms of service • People don’t read in general • Real names in testimonials or don’t bother • Kill your darlings (that clever feature nobody uses) • The back button should always work, always • URLs are UI, make them readable • If it works without JavaScript, you’re doing it right • Tasteful advertising is absolutely ok • Design for both light and dark mode • Error messages should be human readable • Delete more code than you write • Boring tech > bleeding edge • Email is still the best notification system • Don’t store what you don’t need • Privacy by default > asking for forgiveness • Mobile-first is just “first” now • Documentation lies, code doesn’t • Pagination > infinite scroll • Your 404 page gets more traffic than you think • Error logs are your friend

Finally done cleaning up my dead/zombie followers. Went from 20k to 8k and honestly? Feels amazing. The 20k was a nice ego boost but fuck that, I want to connect with actual humans. So if you’re still here after the purge, I appreciate you. Real engagement over vanity metrics any day 🙌

So many successful founders retroactively make their chaos look like strategy. The pivot was "always planned", the accident was "intuition." Watch any founder interview five years after they've made it. It seems like the whole mess has been cleaned up for a TED talk. The three months they ran out of money became "a calculated risk to extend runway." The co-founder who quit becomes "a strategic restructuring." The feature that saved the company but was built on a dare becomes "deep customer insight." Here's what actually happened, though. Most successful companies are barely holding it together for the first few years. The strategy is "please don't die today." The vision is "fuck, I hope this works." The pivots are just throwing everything at the wall until something sticks. But you can't exactly pitch investors with "we got lucky and just kept shipping stuff." Nobody's buying a business book called "We Had No Idea What We Were Doing" (though honestly, I'd read that). So we clean it up and make it sound intentional. The panic becomes calculated risks, and the accidents become "insights". And look, it's not even lying really. Our brains literally rewrite the memories. That feature you only built because you were too tired to make the complex one? A year later, you remember it as genius prioritization. The brain can't handle success being random, so it invents patterns. The problem is when new founders read these stories and think that's actually how it works. Like successful founders had some master plan from day one. They didn't. Nobody does. We're all just making it up as we go, then writing the strategy document after we know what worked. The real story is always messier than the case study.

I once spent $3k on a logo before having a single customer or subscriber. It’s in a folder somewhere collecting digital dust🤦‍♂️ Now it's just an simple SVG icon + clean af typography. 20 minutes vs 20 days.

Ok, gotta be clear about something. There's 0 (zero!) reason to brag about 100 Lighthouse scores from your local machine. Instead, spin up a $5 VPS, deploy your site there, and then run Lighthouse. You'll get wildly different results that actually reflect what users experience. Your local machine is not the real world.

The “startup grind” is the most overhyped crap out there. Sleep deprivation isn’t ambition. Living on caffeine isn’t discipline. Working yourself sick isn’t noble. You don’t need to wreck your body for some fake badge of hustle.

Imposter syndrome at 25: everyone knows more than me Imposter syndrome at 43: everyone thinks I know more than I do The reality… nobody knows what the fuck they’re doing.

Atlassian is buying The Browser Company (Arc and Dia) for $610M... don't know what to think. Between this and Google/Mozilla's deal potentially dying from the antitrust ruling, are we heading for a world that's just Chromium and Safari? Firefox might die without that Google money (hopefully not!), Arc is now enterprise software. The independent browser is becoming extinct 🤔

Debug and fix stuff on prod 😳 Your staging environment is lying to you anyway.

Developer tools have always been the most paradoxical market. We spend money like it's going out of style, but we also love building our own. This tension has existed forever. So what happens when your target market is also your competition? Your best customers will eventually build their own version. How is this sustainable?

Everyone celebrates pivots that worked. Nobody talks about how they poison your decision-making forever. Once you’ve successfully pivoted, every hard moment becomes a potential pivot point. Every customer complaint, every slow month, every technical challenge whispers “maybe we should pivot.” You lose the ability to push through difficulty because you’ve been rewarded for abandoning ship before. The successful pivot creates a founder who can’t commit. I’d rather sell and start fresh than pivot. Clean break, no pattern to repeat.

Designers: Here's the pixel-perfect mockup Developers: Cool, here's 75% of that PM: Ship it Users: Why is this broken? Everyone: Must be a browser issue ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You know that writing style where every point is “it’s not about X, it’s about Y”? It’s called contrast framing. It works. It’s punchy. It’s also f*cking exhausting. Reading it feels like having someone constantly correct you when you weren’t even wrong. Just tell me what it is. I don’t need to know all the things it isn’t.

Wild discovery: my Twitter account is algorithmically broken. With 11k followers, my posts average about 200 views (1.8% reach). The exact same content on Threads, where I have a little over 470 followers, routinely gets 3k+ views (638% reach), often reaching even more people and getting 25k or even 100k+ views. This tells me that the content isn't the issue. So, backstory. I grew this 𝕏 account to about 20k followers between 2007-2015 when things were arguably a bit different. Then I went on autopilot for a few years (I know, my bad), just posting links and not interacting much. I came back 2-3 months ago, removed 9k dead followers, started posting daily, engaging constantly. Still stuck in the same 200-views prison. Ain't nobody got time for that. My tweets show in search, so I'm not shadowbanned. Just... ignored. Only the same 150-200 people ever see my content (I appreciate you very much🧸) In the spirit of documenting things in public I figured I'd document the recovery attempt: removing another 4k inactive followers to get down to 7k. I'm pretty sure this won't do anything though. Sometimes you have to admit the engine is blown. The irony? Only about 200 of you will even see this tweet. If you see me interact via a new account, no surprises, you know why. If you do see this very post, consider yourself part of the exclusive 1.8% club 📊 And if this resonates, feel free to like, repost, and share. It'd be nuts if this broke through 😅

Finally done cleaning up my dead/zombie followers. Went from 20k to 8k and honestly? Feels amazing. The 20k was a nice ego boost but fuck that, I want to connect with actual humans. So if you’re still here after the purge, I appreciate you. Real engagement over vanity metrics any day 🙌

The “startup grind” is the most overhyped crap out there. Sleep deprivation isn’t ambition. Living on caffeine isn’t discipline. Working yourself sick isn’t noble. You don’t need to wreck your body for some fake badge of hustle.

Just some things I believe to be true when it comes to building for the web: • Accessibility isn’t optional • Typography > everything else • One VPS > your k8s cluster • 1,000 fans > 100k ghosts • Revenue > vanity metrics • Profit > Revenue • Bootstrap > VC brain damage • Ship simple > plan complex • Fix bugs > add features • Loyal users > new signups • Page speed > fancy animations • Craft CMS > WordPress • Tailwind works but we all look the same now • The web is incredible and terrible • Edge computing is for 1% of apps • Most sites need better content, not better tech • Your startup doesn’t need microservices • Performance > aesthetics (but why not both) • Semantic HTML > div soup • Progressive enhancement still matters • Cache everything, invalidate carefully • SQLite until it breaks (it probably won’t) • Server-side rendering > SPA by default • HTML forms work fine actually • Your users don’t care about your tech stack • Most sites don’t need a build process • CSS Grid solved layout • Loading spinners all suck • Nobody reads terms of service • People don’t read in general • Real names in testimonials or don’t bother • Kill your darlings (that clever feature nobody uses) • The back button should always work, always • URLs are UI, make them readable • If it works without JavaScript, you’re doing it right • Tasteful advertising is absolutely ok • Design for both light and dark mode • Error messages should be human readable • Delete more code than you write • Boring tech > bleeding edge • Email is still the best notification system • Don’t store what you don’t need • Privacy by default > asking for forgiveness • Mobile-first is just “first” now • Documentation lies, code doesn’t • Pagination > infinite scroll • Your 404 page gets more traffic than you think • Error logs are your friend

How people can sleep on planes is beyond me. Like, there’s no way.

I know I said this… but have you seen that new orange colour? 😲

I once spent $3k on a logo before having a single customer or subscriber. It’s in a folder somewhere collecting digital dust🤦‍♂️ Now it's just an simple SVG icon + clean af typography. 20 minutes vs 20 days.

🤦‍♂️ fml

So many successful founders retroactively make their chaos look like strategy. The pivot was "always planned", the accident was "intuition." Watch any founder interview five years after they've made it. It seems like the whole mess has been cleaned up for a TED talk. The three months they ran out of money became "a calculated risk to extend runway." The co-founder who quit becomes "a strategic restructuring." The feature that saved the company but was built on a dare becomes "deep customer insight." Here's what actually happened, though. Most successful companies are barely holding it together for the first few years. The strategy is "please don't die today." The vision is "fuck, I hope this works." The pivots are just throwing everything at the wall until something sticks. But you can't exactly pitch investors with "we got lucky and just kept shipping stuff." Nobody's buying a business book called "We Had No Idea What We Were Doing" (though honestly, I'd read that). So we clean it up and make it sound intentional. The panic becomes calculated risks, and the accidents become "insights". And look, it's not even lying really. Our brains literally rewrite the memories. That feature you only built because you were too tired to make the complex one? A year later, you remember it as genius prioritization. The brain can't handle success being random, so it invents patterns. The problem is when new founders read these stories and think that's actually how it works. Like successful founders had some master plan from day one. They didn't. Nobody does. We're all just making it up as we go, then writing the strategy document after we know what worked. The real story is always messier than the case study.

Developer tools have always been the most paradoxical market. We spend money like it's going out of style, but we also love building our own. This tension has existed forever. So what happens when your target market is also your competition? Your best customers will eventually build their own version. How is this sustainable?

Real product-market fit is when users tolerate your bugs because you’re solving actual pain. They’ll create workarounds and stay loyal when you’re responsive and keep improving. When you address genuine frustration while showing you care about their experience, users become invested in your success.

The gap between “technically possible” and “worth building” has never been wider. AI can help you build anything in a weekend. That doesn’t mean anyone wants it. Validate and work on distribution before you write a single line of code. Then keep working on it WHILE YOU BUILD. Not after. The graveyard is full of technically impressive products nobody knew existed.

Atlassian is buying The Browser Company (Arc and Dia) for $610M... don't know what to think. Between this and Google/Mozilla's deal potentially dying from the antitrust ruling, are we heading for a world that's just Chromium and Safari? Firefox might die without that Google money (hopefully not!), Arc is now enterprise software. The independent browser is becoming extinct 🤔

Every bug you ship teaches you something no amount of QA or unit tests ever will: how people actually use your shit. They’ll input dates backwards, upload PDFs sideways, and rage click on buttons because it didn’t load fast enough. The secret to debugging is shipping fast enough that fixing bugs feels like progress instead of failure. Your users are better debuggers than you’ll ever be. They’re accidentally destructive in ways you can’t imagine.