Nick: consultant, writer, and bon vivant
Let's all agree to stop saying we "did" a place
My preference going forward shall be "to visit."
August 16, 2024
Master the Reminder app for weekly planning
You've always had the power my dear, you just had to learn it for yourself.
July 27, 2024
Common names of fish in Italian
A somewhat comprehensive list of seafood words in Italian.
February 9, 2024
Fix 'Bad CPU type in executable' on an M3 MacBook Pro
After upgrading from an Intel to an M3 MacBook Pro, everything from git to ruby to Homebrew needed TLC.
February 4, 2024
Year in Review Template
Growth happens through reflection and change: here's my year-end template to guide my annual retrospective.
December 16, 2023
My Home Automation Journey: the Vision
Could I build a reliable, open home automation system?
December 1, 2023
Build a Lexicon of Acronyms, Abbreviations and Terms in Microsoft OneNote
OneNote isn't my favorite tool, but it's enough to build a powerful glossary.
September 22, 2023
Native plantings for Chicago urban parkways
Once established, native plants thrive without much attention, unlike lawn care that requires fertilizers, mowing, watering, pesticides and worse.
September 8, 2023
Export Google Maps Saved Places Lists
Google makes it hard, but you can export your Saved Places.
August 20, 2023
How my Google Maps collapsed
Google Maps is really an ad network. It should be a temporary stopping point for personal mapping information. It can change or go away at any time.
August 17, 2023
AI chatbots are incredibly convincing — even when they're wrong
ChatAIs are designed to be convincing and to respond in human-like prose. So what happens when they are wrong?
April 7, 2023
Fostering innovation at work: fresh takeaways inspired from the Italian Renaissance
How did the Medicis lead Florence to be the center of innovation?
March 4, 2023
Front Matter CMS: debugging preview images in the dashboard
Three steps to debug Front Matter CMS dashboard article dashboard images.
January 31, 2023
Front Matter: a headless CMS for Hugo that runs in VS Code
The pending shutdown of Forestry.io had me looking for an alternative headless CMS. Front Matter runs locally, and was the perfect solution for my needs.
January 29, 2023
Launch in two weeks: thoughts on agile Minimum Marketable Features
Deliver value by breaking it down.
August 19, 2022
The Clean Coder
Martin's book is both a code of conduct for professional developers and a history of computing technology.
July 19, 2022
Master Complicated Subjects With Spaced Repetition
Master concepts, vocabulary, syntax and more, easily, given time.
June 15, 2022
Document Notion databases With ER models in Mermaid
Clarify complex Notion apps with diagrams featuring 'just enough' ER notation to get it done.
June 10, 2022
Yoda vs Eisenhower: frameworks to set priority on your overloaded task list
Even Yoda had a to-do list.
June 7, 2022
Notion: two ways to automatically add a date stamp to tasks marked as done
Using formulas and an override, you can easily record the date a task was completed.
May 31, 2022
Guidelines for voice-first apps
#Product management#User experience
Four ideas, learned through experience, on how to build better voice-first apps.
May 24, 2022
4 ways modern sites and apps help businesses find product market fit
Modern websites help businesses and startups learn from the marketplace. They help companies make a sustained impact, through cycles of continuous innovation.
March 23, 2022
Component-driven development is transforming the web
The web is migrating from page-based to component-based development. What are they?
March 23, 2022
What is a legacy content management system?
The application architecture of legacy CMSes creates challenges.
February 8, 2022
How decoupled architectures help manage complex business problems
#Static sites#Product management
If you hang around technology folks long enough, you'll eventually hear about headless, which makes me think of chickens. In fact, it's an architecture design pattern that helps businesses handle new problems.
October 11, 2021
Speed: how modern websites double conversions
What if there were a magic wand that could increase double your site conversions? There is: it's called performance, and it's typically ignored. Here's how to change that.
October 10, 2021
Equifax paid a $425M settlement for an avoidable hack
More than 200 million customer records were stolen in the largest data breach in history. What's worse, the hack could have been avoided.
October 9, 2021
When should information design disrupt the flow?
Normally, we should always present information in easily consumable ways. But sometimes, you've got to stop the train. See when disruptive design helps users, and how.
April 2, 2021
Edge cases are opportunities to excel
Edge cases embody what a software system can and cannot do—and what it can't do well and for whom. Improve your business by exploring them well.
March 30, 2021
Build a voice-first UX with Shortcuts and Apple Health
When designing a voice-first experience, developers must create guard rails around all the many unexpected edge cases.
March 9, 2021
Book Review: Shape Up
Shape Up is an excellent read for software teams who are looking to improve their development practices. It’s not capital-A-Agile, nor kanban, nor pair nor agile nor a mashup of methodologies: instead, it’s an organic practice developed at Basecamp over the years to address their specific needs as a software team dedicated to the development, maintenance, support, and growth of SAAS digital products. I particularly liked how the book addressed both “Truths” in software development, and the apparatus they developed to address the Truths.
July 7, 2020
1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created
A rollercoaster recounting of the impact of what is now called the Columbian Exchange: globalization V1.0
June 24, 2020
Six video resources for Italian diction training
I’ve reached a frustrating plateau in my study of Italian recently and decided to embark on a series of deep dives on diction, translation, and grammar. Any study of diction will inevitably start with the International Phonetic Alphabet, the IPA — the primary system of phonetic notation. Fortunately, Italian phonology has a much smaller subset of the full sounds the IPA represents, but still represents a significant body of work to study, especially considering the notation.
June 14, 2020
Master Hugo modules: rapidly develop modules locally
With a simple configuration change, it's easy to develop modules locally, without a lot of git pulls and pushes
June 9, 2020
How I built a Kanban writing status system inside Ulysses
I've used — and maybe misused — Ulysses as my primary writing app for years. I finally have an organizational system to support what I want it to do.
May 22, 2020
Master Hugo modules: handle content or assets as modules
Develop master libraries of reusable, read-only resources shared across multiple projects through easy-to-use Hugo modules.
May 13, 2020
Master Hugo modules: managing themes as modules
When I first encountered Hugo modules, I didn’t really understand their value. As I worked on more and more Hugo projects, I started to feel the pain of typical git submodules. I started to read, and re-read documentation both at Hugo and Go, trying to wrap my mind around modules. I also read lots of questions, problems, and approaches in the Hugo Discourse space. Thanks to a lot of experimentation and tests, and time, they became clear to me—and very, very elegant.
April 19, 2020
Automate scheduled builds with Hugo, Netlify, and GitLab’s CI/CD pipeline
Scheduled Hugo builds—on an hourly or daily basis—can be handled within GitLab's CI/CD pipeline for free, without an external third-party dependency.
February 17, 2020
Modular content modeling in the JAMstack framework with Forestry's Front Matter Templates and Hugo
Front Matter Templates make it straightforward to develop modular content models that govern both content structure and content behaviors. FMT sub-components enable an Atomic Design approach to modeling, ensuring consistency while reducing effort.
January 20, 2020
Nick’s “Birthday” Winter Getaway in Holbox
Nick and Pietro visited Holbox in 2017 and loved it. Since my birthday is over the Christmas/New Year’s holidays when folks are often traveling, I thought we’d gather and celebrate my “uncountable” collection of years properly.
January 3, 2020
Improve your website with these automated scanning tools
Everyone—business owners and product managers alike—should use automated site audit tools to validate and improve their websites and web applications.
March 26, 2019
Host a human-centered project kickoff for project health and happiness
The primary goal of the project kickoff is to establish a tone of trust for the working team—as well as get out of the way all the initial logistics of today’s collaborative work environment.
March 5, 2019