This was my favorite book of 2018. It profoundly impacted the way I approach my work and organize my time. After reading it, I find it easier to maintain concentration and to prioritize important tasks. It was also the final push I needed to un-addict myself from social media.

I love refactoring. Nothing satisfies me more than untangling spaghetti code to reveal its underlying logic in a clear, intuitive way.

I’ve learned that refactoring requires diligence. In my younger and more reckless days, I would rush into a legacy codebase and tear apart the code without any concern for controlled changes. Inevitably, days or weeks later, I would discover that I broke the code by removing a subtle piece that seemed irrelevant but was, in fact, critical for an obscure scenario.

Prior to February 2019, I published all my retrospectives on Indie Hackers:

• Zestful Month 5: Launched, but Still No Customers

Given how much urban design affects our lives, it’s surprising how little we think about and participate in it. This book was eye-opening in terms of the way I look at cities and how its inhabitants interact with them.

I took for granted the idea that cities should be friendly to car-travel, but the book highlights many ways in which a focus on car-friendliness makes cities worse overall. It was interesting to see examples of how cities can flourish when they prioritize the needs of pedestrians, bicyclists, and public transit.

In this post, I demonstrate how to retrofit automated tests onto an untested legacy library.

This is part two of a three-part series about how I resurrected ingredient-phrase-tagger, a library that uses machine learning to parse cooking ingredients (e.g., “2 cups milk”) into structured data. Read part one for the full context, but the short version is that I discovered an abandoned library and brought it back to life so that it could power my SaaS business: