Projects, writings, and the work in between.
I printed my entire personal site — 404 page included — stapled it, and handed it to a hiring manager in Manhattan. What the paper version revealed about my digital self surprised me more than any analytics dashboard ever has.
I spent a month answering every single reply to my newsletter, and it quietly rearranged how I think about an audience. Turns out 'traffic' was a number and 'readers' were people, and I'd been confusing the two for years.
I laid my one-page résumé next to my personal site and asked a simple question: which one lies less? Turns out they bend the truth in completely different directions — one through compression, the other through curation.
I turned the most boilerplate part of my website into a public experiment: an anonymous voting widget next to every skill I claim to know. Here's what hundreds of strangers believed, what they roasted, and what they ignored completely.
I spent 30 days with my real phone number, email, and a booking link live on my personal site. Here's the full ledger of spam, strange voicemails, and two opportunities I would've missed otherwise.
For one month, I ran an unmoderated 'random page' button on my website and let strangers wander wherever chance took them. What they clicked on said more about my story than any heatmap ever has.
After digging into my analytics, I learned most visitors were gone before my hero image finished loading. So I rebuilt the whole site around one brutal assumption: nobody cares, at first.
I spent months tweaking my portfolio in a bubble, then a stranger posted 90 seconds of themselves scrolling through it and I learned more from that video than from a year of analytics. Here's why unsolicited, unfiltered reactions hit different — and how to make it easy for people to give them to you.
After fumbling through an introduction at a Chicago meetup, I realized the clearest version of my story was already sitting on my About page. Turns out, building a personal site is really an exercise in writing the words you'll need when someone asks, "So, what do you do?"
A single line of feedback on a project page sent me down a rabbit hole about how I present work — and how much of it I should actually listen to. Here's what I learned about collecting feedback without letting it run your life.
Every abandoned side project in my digital graveyard started the same way: with a plan that required motivation I didn't have. So I stopped making plans and started making deals — ten minutes, that's it, you can quit after that. Here's the psychology behind why the trick works, plus an honest week-by-week log of what happened when I ran it on a real project.
I spent three weeks interviewing recruiters and hiring managers about how they evaluate candidates online, and the results upended my assumptions. Turns out the About page — not the portfolio — is where interviews are actually won.
I stripped my website down to five pages, killed every plugin, and published nothing but the essentials for a full month. Here's what happened to my traffic, my sanity, and my writing.
One tiny project, essay, or update — published publicly, every week, for a month. No strategy, no launch plan. Here's the honest ledger of what worked, what flopped, and why the smallest week was the hardest one.
Your résumé gets 7 seconds. Your personal site gets a real visit. Here's what recruiters and hiring managers told me they're actually looking for when they click through to your corner of the internet — and what quietly sinks candidates before anyone hits reply.
Every creative person has a graveyard of almosts — the app at 60%, the essay at paragraph three, the podcast that died after two episodes. Here's why showing your WIP pile might be the most honest thing you ever publish.
Most personal sites die within a year because they're built like fireworks: one spectacular launch, then silence. The sites that last are built like houseplants — watered a little, pruned occasionally, and allowed to grow at their own pace.
Everyone's portfolio shows the winners. This is the other list — five projects I abandoned, each with a short autopsy. Spoiler: the failures taught me more than any launch ever did.
A polished LinkedIn profile tells people what you claim to have done. A living portfolio shows them what you've actually shipped. Here's why building in public became the best career move I never planned.
After five years of feature creep, I rebuilt my personal site from a blank file. What survived, what got cut, and the honest postmortem on the stuff that never made it past the prototype.