Nick: consultant, writer, and bon vivant

👋🏽
I’m Nick. I’m an epicure, athlete, traveller, and writer. I work as a management and technology consultant. You can learn more about me, or find me on X @nickgracilla or Mastadon @nickgracilla.

Let's all agree to stop saying we "did" a place

My preference going forward shall be "to visit."

Read more →

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.

Read more →

July 27, 2024

Common names of fish in Italian

#Italian

A somewhat comprehensive list of seafood words in Italian.

Read more →

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.

Read more →

February 4, 2024

Year in Review Template

Growth happens through reflection and change: here's my year-end template to guide my annual retrospective.

Read more →

December 16, 2023

My Home Automation Journey: the Vision

Could I build a reliable, open home automation system?

Read more →

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.

Read more →

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.

Read more →

September 8, 2023

Export Google Maps Saved Places Lists

Google makes it hard, but you can export your Saved Places.

Read more →

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.

Read more →

August 17, 2023

How not to introduce change at work

Change is hard. Don't be Carmy.

Read more →

May 19, 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?

Read more →

April 7, 2023

My Father's House

#Book reviews

The story of the Catholic resistance to Nazism.

Read more →

March 29, 2023

Fostering innovation at work: fresh takeaways inspired from the Italian Renaissance

How did the Medicis lead Florence to be the center of innovation?

Read more →

March 4, 2023

Front Matter CMS: debugging preview images in the dashboard

Three steps to debug Front Matter CMS dashboard article dashboard images.

Read more →

January 31, 2023

Front Matter: a headless CMS for Hugo that runs in VS Code

#Static sites

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.

Read more →

January 29, 2023

Launch in two weeks: thoughts on agile Minimum Marketable Features

Deliver value by breaking it down.

Read more →

August 19, 2022

Indelible City

#Book reviews

We have no choice but to reinvent ourselves.

Read more →

July 19, 2022

The Clean Coder

#Book reviews

Martin's book is both a code of conduct for professional developers and a history of computing technology.

Read more →

July 19, 2022

Write a great bug report

#Product management

A great bug report can be as short as a tweet.

Read more →

June 20, 2022

Master Complicated Subjects With Spaced Repetition

#Language learning#PKM

Master concepts, vocabulary, syntax and more, easily, given time.

Read more →

June 15, 2022

Document Notion databases With ER models in Mermaid

#PKM#Product management

Clarify complex Notion apps with diagrams featuring 'just enough' ER notation to get it done.

Read more →

June 10, 2022

Notion: two ways to automatically add a date stamp to tasks marked as done

#PKM

Using formulas and an override, you can easily record the date a task was completed.

Read more →

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.

Read more →

May 24, 2022

4 ways modern sites and apps help businesses find product market fit

#Product management

Modern websites help businesses and startups learn from the marketplace. They help companies make a sustained impact, through cycles of continuous innovation.

Read more →

March 23, 2022

Component-driven development is transforming the web

#Product management

The web is migrating from page-based to component-based development. What are they?

Read more →

March 23, 2022

What is a legacy content management system?

#Static sites

The application architecture of legacy CMSes creates challenges.

Read more →

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.

Read more →

October 11, 2021

Speed: how modern websites double conversions

#Product management

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.

Read more →

October 10, 2021

Equifax paid a $425M settlement for an avoidable hack

#Security

More than 200 million customer records were stolen in the largest data breach in history. What's worse, the hack could have been avoided.

Read more →

October 9, 2021

When should information design disrupt the flow?

#User experience

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.

Read more →

April 2, 2021

Edge cases are opportunities to excel

#Product management

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.

Read more →

March 30, 2021

Build a voice-first UX with Shortcuts and Apple Health

#User experience

When designing a voice-first experience, developers must create guard rails around all the many unexpected edge cases.

Read more →

March 9, 2021

Book Review: Shape Up

#Book reviews

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.

Read more →

July 7, 2020

1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

#Book reviews

A rollercoaster recounting of the impact of what is now called the Columbian Exchange: globalization V1.0

Read more →

June 24, 2020

Six video resources for Italian diction training

#Language learning

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.

Read more →

June 14, 2020

Master Hugo modules: rapidly develop modules locally

#Static sites

With a simple configuration change, it's easy to develop modules locally, without a lot of git pulls and pushes

Read more →

June 9, 2020

How I built a Kanban writing status system inside Ulysses

#PKM

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.

Read more →

May 22, 2020

Master Hugo modules: handle content or assets as modules

#Static sites

Develop master libraries of reusable, read-only resources shared across multiple projects through easy-to-use Hugo modules.

Read more →

May 13, 2020

Master Hugo modules: managing themes as modules

#Static sites

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.

Read more →

April 19, 2020

Automate scheduled builds with Hugo, Netlify, and GitLab’s CI/CD pipeline

#DevOps#Static sites

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.

Read more →

February 17, 2020

Modular content modeling in the JAMstack framework with Forestry's Front Matter Templates and Hugo

#Static sites

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.

Read more →

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.

Read more →

January 3, 2020

Improve your website with these automated scanning tools

#Product management

Everyone—business owners and product managers alike—should use automated site audit tools to validate and improve their websites and web applications.

Read more →

March 26, 2019

Host a human-centered project kickoff for project health and happiness

#Product management

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.

Read more →

March 5, 2019