Posts in web

Hosting Your Own Notes On Synology NAS With Docker

January 19, 2021

As I was fiddling with some automation scenarios at home, I thought of putting the Synology Network Attached Storage (NAS) to good use. That is, in addition to all the photo backup stuff it's already doing. At the end of last year, I wrote a blog post about building a simple system to maintain evergreen notes, based on Hugo, Docker, and, well, that's it - there are only Markdown files in the mix. Evergreen notes in this context are nothing other than a personal Wikipedia of sorts.

Gadgets And Software Of The Past

January 10, 2020

I recently discussed a topic that came up through a conversation with an intern I was helping - they were not familiar with the floppy disk icon as the metaphor for “Save”, and thought that it was a box of some sorts. As in - a box in which you put in stuff to “save it”. The next logical thing was for me to sit down and put together a list of things that I will fondly remember in the world of tech, that are likely to not be missed by the next generation as technology becomes much more convenient and frictionless.

Apple - Time To Fix Your Subscription Management

January 7, 2020

This is somewhat of an open letter that I don’t usually write, but we really need to sit down and talk with Apple about account management UX. I am generally a pretty happy Apple user - the iPhone and the Watch are great. However, there is one lingering problem that seems to elude the user experience teams, related to subscription management. In 2020, when more and more services are moving towards a subscription model (Apple Arcade included - that is now a separate tab in the App Store), managing those in one place seems like a key part of customer experience, and Apple is uniquely positioned to address this problem.

Lessons In Building A Scalable Samples Experience

October 5, 2019

You probably heard (or read) a post I wrote back in July about how we built docs.microsoft.com/samples - I talked about some of the foundational elements and the process which we followed to build the site. Now that we’re a couple of months in, I thought I would take a step back and write about some of the lessons learned about shipping the new site, in the hopes that this will be helpful to others who will work on projects of similar scale!