Projects, writings, and the work in between.
Handing someone a business card with nothing but my name and a domain turned out to be the most reliable conversation starter I've ever used. Here's what happened after dozens of people actually went home and typed it in.
The footer is the last place anyone looks and the first place I found out what kind of builder I am. Here's why the most ignored real estate on a website deserves better than a copyright line.
I removed every analytics tool from my personal site for three months and made decisions on taste alone. Here's what got better, what got worse, and what the dashboards were never going to tell me anyway.
I took my entire site offline for a week and asked visitors to rebuild it from memory. What came back had almost nothing to do with my homepage.
I hit print on all eleven pages of my website, waited for the ink to dry, and then did something brutal: I read it like a total stranger wrote it. What survived, what embarrassed me, and what a stack of paper taught me that no analytics dashboard ever could.
Dead links are usually a source of quiet embarrassment, but my broken pages taught me more about my own site than any analytics report. Here's why the error page became the most honest corner of my portfolio — and how to make yours worth stumbling into.
Every January, corporate America fills out self-assessments, so I decided my personal site deserved the same treatment. I gave it a rating, flagged underperforming pages, and — because it earned it — a raise in the form of a new hosting budget.
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.