High Places

December 01, 2025 | 7 minute read

Mankind has always sought out peaks, and vistas. To some degree this obsession is tactical — to plot a course, or spot an approaching enemy. But it is certainly also irrational. We have a deep, almost instinctive appreciation for high places. Our obsession with these vantages is driven in part by our fear of succumbing to them, and in this lies an opportunity.

Password Protecting Gatsby Content

November 22, 2025 | 13 minute read

Gatsby is great at turning everything into static HTML—which is exactly what you don’t want when some posts should be behind a password. In this post I walk through a practical, Firebase-backed pattern for selectively protecting MDX content in a Gatsby 5.

Stranger in a Strange Land

Getting an MBA as a Designer

February 01, 2021 | 9 minute read

Let’s start with a major life update: I’m getting an MBA! I’ve been asked regularly why I left design and tech to spend a bunch of money on a degree that many in tech sneer at. I’ve thought a lot about this, and over the coming months I want to share my insights an observations from the experience. This essay is the first of what I hope is several to come.

Making a Data Supplier Plugin: Part 3

Creating Text Data Providers and Polishing the User Experience

March 28, 2020 | 19 minute read

Designers deserve good user experience too! In the final post of this series, I'll show some simple user experience improvements for your Data Supplier plugin. I'll also explain how to write generalized code that makes it easy to expand and improve your plugin. 💪

Making a Data Supplier Plugin: Part 2

Creating a Sketch Image Data Provider for SVGs

March 25, 2020 | 12 minute read

A really powerful feature of Sketch is being able to pull images into your project using a Data Supplier. Building off of part one of this series, in this second post I'll detail how to query an API for an image, convert it to a Sketch friendly format and insert it into your project automagically. 🎩🐰✨

Making a Data Supplier Plugin: Part 1

Bootstrapping Your Sketch Plugin with SKPM

March 21, 2020 | 10 minute read

As a designer of Chemistry software, I spend a lot of time inserting fake chemical data into my mocks — so I decided to create a Sketch Data Supplier plugin to make streamline my workflow. This blog series walks through my learnings as I built out this plugin. In this first post, I'll explain the basics of setting up a data supplier plugin using SKPM.

Triggering a File Download from an XHR Post Request

July 07, 2018 | 4 minute read

If you need your webapp to offer a file download for an asset created on the fly, like say a PDF generated from content entered by a user, how do you do that? This was a puzzle I encountered not too long ago on a personal proejct. I dug around and found a pretty solid solution, which I'll detail in this post.

Frequent Visitor

Resetting a Tree's Visited State

June 06, 2016 | 6 minute read

If you've ever written an algorithm that involves traversing a tree or graph, you've dealt with the concept of marking a node as "visited". Often, this is act is taken care of of with a simple boolean flag in each node. This works great for single traversals of a tree; that is, you search a tree for something once, and then never look at the tree again. But what if you want to traverse the tree over and over again? Here I'll present a simple strategy for resetting the visited status to "unvisited" for all nodes in a tree in constant time.

Migrating GitHub Repositories with GitMover

May 26, 2016 | 4 minute read

GitHub Enterprise has been a godsend to developers working at companies that need to keep code on their own servers. GitHub was a distant dream at IBM before GitHub Enterprise, and now many of our teams use it. In fact, GitHub is so popular as a project management tool, many teams have done away with Jira and the like in favor of GitHub issues and ZenHub.

Using SocketIO with Python and Flask on Heroku

January 29, 2015 | 6 minute read

Sometimes all you want to do is put together small web app with a Python based server. Flask is the go-to choice and it couldn't be easier to use. Launching your app on Heroku with Flask is a well documented process. But things kind of hit a wall when you want to use SocketIO for websockets. Every tutorial online is basically a chat-app with an overly complicated process of integrating Redis, and at the end of the day, doesn't lay out the basics of bare-bones websocket integration. Often times, I simply need a few event handlers - not the full schebang. This tutorial explains how to set up an extremely simple Flask webapp including basic SocketIO event handlers, and launch it to Heroku.

Nucleobytes

Channel Coding for Mutation Resistance

January 04, 2015 | 3 minute read

What if historians today had access to detailed census data from hundreds or thousands of years ago? It's pretty obvious that our understanding of past cultures would be drastically different. However, what are we doing to prevent the same cycle hundreds of years from now? Where are we storing the massive reams of data that future societies would find invaluable?

How to Display Custom Images on a E-Ink Screen with Arduino

October 30, 2014 | 7 minute read

I recently got the RePaper E-Ink display to use with an Arduino Uno. The Arduino Uno isn't powerful enough to do more complex things like dynamically write content to the screen (such as text or shapes). What it can do very well is show images loaded into memory. However, I couldn't find any good resources for how to load custom images onto the Arduino — so I wrote on myself!