Why I Ended Up in Browser-Based 3D Land The breaking point was a 47-minute Slack thread trying to explain to a motion designer how to orbit the camera in Blender. She wasn’t incompetent — she was a genuinely skilled 2D animator who had zero reason to learn a 3D viewport navigation paradigm just to swap … Read more
The Problem: Your QR Code Looks Like It Belongs on a Shipping Label The thing that caught me off guard wasn’t that ugly QR codes performed worse — it was how much worse. I had two QR codes going to the same URL on the same flyer, printed side by side in an A/B batch. … Read more
The Real Problem With Recorded Tests The checkout flow test passes on your machine, passes in your demo to the team, and then fails at 3am in CI every single day for two weeks. You dig into the logs and find a different failure mode each time — sometimes it’s a missing element, sometimes a … Read more
I Needed Reliable Transactional Email — So I Tried All Three Password reset emails were landing in Gmail’s spam folder. Not occasionally — consistently. My small SaaS app had maybe 200 active users at the time, and I was getting support tickets every week from people who never got their confirmation emails. The culprit was … Read more
I Needed a Reliable Email Provider and Got Burned Twice First The thing that broke my trust in email providers wasn’t an outage or a billing surprise — it was silence. One provider I was running for a SaaS product was quietly dropping roughly 3% of sends. No bounce. No error in the API response. … Read more
The Real Problem: You’re Guessing What to Build Next The loudest customer wins. That’s the real algorithm behind most early-stage SaaS roadmaps, and nobody wants to admit it. You’ve got a backlog with 200 items — some submitted six months ago, some copy-pasted from a Slack rant at 11pm — and you’re essentially doing sentiment … Read more
The Actual Problem: Generic Platforms Don’t Fit Weird Products Both platforms assume you’re selling something normal. You probably aren’t. Here’s the thing that took me longer than it should have to articulate: WordPress (WooCommerce) and Webflow both have a mental model of what a product is. WooCommerce thinks a product has a name, a price, … Read more
Introduction: Cutting to the Chase By 2026, Canva and Visme have cemented themselves as powerhouse tools in the DIY design market, widely adopted by startups that need to roll out snappy visuals without a dedicated design team. At first glance, Canva might seem like the obvious winner, given its aggressive expansion into AI-driven design suggestions … Read more
The Problem: Your React Tests Are Either Slow, Brittle, or Both Snapshot tests are a trap. I know because I walked straight into it. You write a toMatchSnapshot() call, feel productive, commit it, and three weeks later you’re approving a 400-line snapshot diff because someone changed a button’s aria-label. The test isn’t telling you anything … Read more
The Real Problem: Microsoft Office Licensing in Education Hits Different Mid-year budget cuts to Microsoft 365 are not a hypothetical — I’ve watched this happen to multiple school districts and community colleges. One day teachers have OneDrive syncing lesson plans, the next week IT is fielding panicked emails because accounts are locked and nobody can … Read more