Archives
Two decades of thinking out loud on the internet.
When you've been writing on the internet for over two decades, you're bound to change as much as the technology. A lot of what you'll find here is outdated — and some of it makes the older me wince the way old photos do. But that's the point. This is a document of the journey, not a highlight reel.
624 posts · 27 years · 18 categories
Topics
Personal
The stuff that doesn't fit neatly into a category — anger, joy, hard seasons, and the occasional breakthrough.
88 postsBlogging & CMS
Two decades of tinkering with publishing platforms — mostly Movable Type, but I never could sit still.
78 postsJourneys
Places I've been, career turns I didn't expect, and the occasional road trip that changed how I see things.
71 postsPeople
The people who've shaped me — family, friends, and the communities I've been lucky enough to stumble into.
42 postsWriting
Poems, stories, freewrites, and the occasional attempt to put something real on the page.
39 postsCulture & Politics
Thinking out loud about America — elections, media, civil discourse, and the gaps between what we say and what we do.
36 postsMemories
Looking back — year-end recaps, old stories, and the things that stick with you longer than they should.
31 postsMind
Trying to make sense of things — how people think, why systems work the way they do, and what happens when they don't.
31 postsDesign
The craft side of my work — branding, interfaces, design systems, and the messy process behind all of it.
23 postsWeb Development
Building things for the web — code, stylesheets, accessibility, and the occasional deep rabbit hole.
18 postsVisual
Things that caught my eye — photos, art, film, and the occasional fog-soaked morning.
9 postsYear by Year
2026 4 entries
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Rubber Stamp Finding the balance between acceleration and introspection.
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Design Systems Are AI Infrastructure A talk at Into Design Systems, chock-full of insights from over 8 months of building.
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PDF → Code with AI + MCP A well-structured design system is critical infrastructure for AI-assisted coding.
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Write More Publicly A long-running list of posts I want to write.
2025 8 entries
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Zeroheight Award Nomination We’re a finalist in the Innovation category.
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Accessibility Review of America by Design Big ambitions, but some basics are missing.
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Upcoming Accessibility Panel Digging into compliance, automation, and design systems with civic tech leaders.
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NYC Crew A first gathering in the new NYC office.
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Serious Times History doesn’t repeat itself, but it sure does seems to rhyme.
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NYS Design System Update It’s been a minute since I’ve talked publicly about this work.
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18F Gone A team you’d want to keep around.
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All Means All Older adults and digital inclusion in NYC.
2024 4 entries
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Marathon, Not Sprint The work of improving government digital experiences.
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Strong Product Ownership Taking greater responsibility for the outcome.
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2024 State of the State Establish a New York State Design System. 🎯
2023 12 entries
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Multi-platform Design Systems Highlights from a discussion on The Question with Ben Callahan.
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Don’t Wait Please don’t wait to tell someone that you care.
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In Praise of Generalists Dig wide, not just deep.
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What You Don’t See Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage.
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Saying It Out Loud It’s a tough time in the industry.
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Empire State of UX Guess what? I’m starting a new job with the state of New York!
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Practical Design Systems A few weeks ago, I quietly launched my new design systems consulting company, Practical Design Systems.
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Life Scenarios, Not Personas A better way to evaluate government customer experience.
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Second-Class Time A year-end confession.
2022 3 entries
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Things I Wish I’d Known Advice for the solopreneur route.
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Stop Comparing Saying it out loud in case anyone else needs to hear it.
2021
4 entries
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Platform Innovation at Fox This has been in the works for a few weeks now, but I’m happy to announce that today was my first day as Vice President of Technology for Consumer Products and Engineering at Fox.
2020
3 entries
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The Airbag Has Landed Helping Greg Storey get Airbag Industries off Movable Type and onto a better publishing stack.
2019
21 entries
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2019 In Review: Our Family and Homestead Because I couldn’t really call it ‘a decade in review.’
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31 Days of Making, Day 18: A Whole New Floor (Part 1) My most ambitious making project yet: replacing the flooring in the entire first floor of our house — all 1200 square feet of it.
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When Speaking Out Costs You A historical perspective on the political cost that often comes with speaking truth to power.
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Stop talking about politics, Jesse! Why do you write so much about faith and politics?
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31 Days of Making, Day 12: Piano Improv Extemporaneous piano… the kind of music that soothes my soul.
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31 Days of Making, Day 11: Build That Wall For day 11, I finally made something instead of just tearing stuff down.
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31 Days of Making, Day 10: Unmaking More Walls For day 10 of my December making project, I tore down an old hallway closet in order to build a new closet and a walk-in pantry.
2018
4 entries
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Ruckus in a NYC Rental Agency Ok, get some popcorn. Here’s my crazy NYC story about a tornado, a rented Mustang, 3 strangers, and a fracas involving a labradoodle and the NYPD.
2016
6 entries
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Farewell, Simply Recipes. Today is my last day at Simply Recipes.
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Giving Google Better Photos Using hidden meta tags to pass more appropriate Google images that may not appear on the page.
2015
15 entries
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The Hidden Pinterest Stack After our site took a hit in Google this year, we realized we needed to double down on the social media front. We targeted Pinterest first.
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Don’t Tell People You’re Busy Why do we constantly feel the need to tell people we’re busy?
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How to Win Arguments Online How do you win an argument online?
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Spit the Pits Have you ever had someone tell you something that was true, but you write it off because of who it’s coming from or how they’re telling you?
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Magical Play Spaces The stories we choose to tell and choose to believe are just as powerful now as when we were children.
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On Being Patient I think it’s important to be patient with people.
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On The Move Last year, when we announced that we were moving from Pennsylvania to Upstate New York, we weren’t exactly sure where we were going.
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On Being A Landmark In Someone Else’s Life Journey People change, but people often have a hard time dealing with other people’s change. Is it possible to sustain vibrant relationships through the process?
2014
10 entries
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Farewell, Pennsylvania! After much thought and prayer, our family has decided to move back to Upstate New York.
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Review: Pad & Quill Contega Case TL;DR — This is the best iPad case I’ve ever owned.
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2013 in Review 2013 was relatively uneventful. There weren’t any big events. I had such little recollection of what happened in 2013 that I had to reference my Facebook timeline to write this.
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1,000 Words Focus is the thing, and it’s tough.
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The Currency of Exploitation How the NSA’s approach to security is less about protecting us and more about keeping us ‘exploitable’.
2013
14 entries
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How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Blog I’ve been blogging on and off for almost fifteen years now, and one of the recurring problems I’ve struggled with is the stifling thought that what I’m writing had to be meaningful and cohesive.
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Social Media Hiatus I took a week off social media. This is what I learned.
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The Big Room A Parable for Social Media Addicts
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Capturing Pixel Density with Google Analytics Google Analytics lets you see how many of your users are on mobile devices, but the information you can pull on those devices is woefully limited. One such oversight is pixel density ratio.
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A Better Behaved Infinite Scroll After several days of trying to integrate the Infinite Scroll plugin into the Simply Recipes mobile site, I finally came up with a solution that works well.
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Web Performance Resources Resources from the 2013 Eat Write Retreat technical panel.
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Walking Those Last Few Steps An old friend reached out to me recently with sad news that his mother was dying. As you might imagine, he was struggling with how to handle it. The brief back-and-forth we had brought to mind a similar journey I took to the brink of death with my mother-in-law a few years back.
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Iceber.gs: First Impressions It’s like Pinterest and Evernote got together and had a good-looking baby.
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Moving From Google Reader to Fever In case you were handcuffed to a pole in Jesse Pinkman’s basement and missed the announcement, Google Reader is getting put out to pasture this July 1.
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Pinterest Image Overlays Some code snippets to give you a nice looking Pinterest overlay for your images.
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So You Want To Learn To Code? The best place to start is by realizing that coding is fundamentally about solving problems. It’s not about variables or subroutines or even the code itself. Those are just the means to an end. Coding is about identifying problems and finding the best way solve those problems.
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Evaluating 4 Responsive Designs We’ve got a Simply Recipes redesign on the horizon, and one of the priorities for this new design will be making it responsive.
2012
14 entries
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My First Business Venture The story begins and ends with a Christmas tree.
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Why I Chose Spotify over Rdio Sorry, Rdio, it’s not you, it’s me. Well, it’s kind of you. Actually, it is you, Rdio.
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WordPress hRecipe Gotcha Help! My recipe thumbnails aren’t showing up in Google search results anymore!
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The Disguised Blessing of Being Unpopular We’re hardwired to crave feedback. We’re always looking to improve, to refine, to gauge our words and actions against the response of other human beings.
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Startled Fawn I woke up before the sunrise this morning and decided to take a walk instead of tossing in bed.
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My 10 Most Useful Shell Commands I use most of these commands on a regular basis, so I thought I’d pass them along in the hope that others find them useful.
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Email Your Kids Children mark the passing of time. I’ve never been as aware of the passing of time as I am now.
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A Better System for Passwords No one likes talking about passwords. No one wants to give away secrets to the bad guys, and no one wants people becoming lemmings and copying their system exactly. I’m going out on a limb here and making some suggestions that will help you make your passwords more secure. Don’t be a lemming, please.
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“Distracted With Much Serving” I just began a 6-week sabbatical from my ministry responsibilities at Oxford Valley Chapel. I’ve been serving as associate pastor there for over six years, and this time away was much needed, for several reasons.
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Cheap Site Backups Using Amazon S3 I created a PHP script that archives a specific folder and database then uploads the archives to an Amazon S3 bucket for safe keeping. Here’s how it works, hopefully it can help you get your backups in order.
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South Bye Southwest South by Southwest holds a special place in my heart.
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It’s Simple, Really The river of life is twisting, unexpected and wild.
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Looking Back on a Year of 30 Day Challenges Hard to imagine that I began my 30 day challenge experiment a full year ago—though, not really. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in life, it’s that time barrels along regardless of how aware you are of its pace. It’s our choice to either mark the passing of time and consider those dearly departed moments or stumble forward into the next moments like zombies.
2011
18 entries
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30 Days Without Caffeine: What I Learned When I started this month, I knew this challenge was going to be a difficult one. I’m not a rabid coffee drinker, but I do partake of it daily with a steady flow of soda throughout the day. Let’s just say it’s enough caffeine that I notice when it’s gone.
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Remembering These Moments I suppose it should come as no surprise to me, but the present seems so much weightier than the past.
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Cache Busting Bookmarklets One of the biggest hassles when trying to track down and squash bugs in a large-scale production environment is dealing with multiple layers of caching.
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New Things and Blessings This month’s challenge to do something new every day has been difficult given my busy yet monotonous routine, but I’ve already found it to be profoundly rewarding.
2010
24 entries
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Nancy Jean Clum (1958 - 2010) I had the privilege of calling this woman my mother-in-law. I know that phrase that often stirs up a lot of negative stereotypes, but if anyone could rescue the term, it was this remarkable woman.
2009
12 entries
2008
66 entries
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5 No-prep Group Games for Parties Looking for some crazy fun games to play when you’ve got a bunch of people over? Here are a few time-tested gems from our family’s game trove.
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A Biblical View of Sex Unfortunately, sex has gotten a bad rap in Christian circles.
2007
80 entries
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Redesign, Part 2: Stylesheet Philosophy I am not a developer.
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Majesty Snowbird Sufjan (Soofyan) Stevens. You either love him or you hate him. Or you’re like me and you hated his music right smack dab up to the point when you fell in love with his music.
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Mosquito Tone Test, or How To Tell You’re A Young’un Note: I’ve been informed that if you’re not careful and have your volume up too high, this could damage your speakers. Consider yourself warned!
2006
89 entries
2005
111 entries
2004
26 entries
2003
12 entries
2001
37 entries
Feeling adventurous?
Three random posts from the archive.