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
The Situation That Made Me Pick a Side Four people. Zero dedicated designers. A founder, two engineers (including me), and a product manager who’d used Sketch once in 2019. We had two weeks to get a clickable, investor-ready prototype built for a B2B SaaS dashboard — the kind where you tap through three or four … Read more
My Stack After Burning Through a Dozen Tools Most “best tools for data science” lists are written by someone who watched a YouTube tutorial, got a Jupyter notebook running, and called it research. I know because I wrote one of those lists in 2022 and I’m embarrassed by it now. The tools I actually depend … Read more
Why I Stopped Recommending Jira to Every Startup I Work With The breaking point was a Tuesday afternoon. I’d just joined a 6-person seed-stage startup as a fractional CTO — two backend devs, one frontend, a designer, a PM, and a founder who kept jumping in on tickets. Simple team. Clear scope. We needed to … Read more
The Problem That Made Me Test Both The breaking point wasn’t a crash or a missing feature. It was a Zapier bill. One Zap — a single lead routing workflow for one client — was burning through 400+ tasks per month. That’s a client on HubSpot sending form submissions to Google Sheets, triggering a Slack … Read more
Introduction: The AI Chatbot space in 2026 In 2026, SaaS customer support is increasingly leaning on AI chatbots to handle routine inquiries. But, despite the leaps in AI capabilities, we’re not anywhere near ditching human touch altogether. Let’s dive into why AI is seen as a critical tool in this space, and why it’s not … Read more
The Problem That Made Me Try Both The sprint planning meeting that broke me happened on a Tuesday afternoon. Four of us had the same Google Sheet open — the one we’d been using as a “temporary” backlog tracker for eight months — and we were watching each other’s cursors collide in real time. Someone’s … Read more
Why Healthcare App Development is a Different Beast Most apps you build are forgiving. You ship a bug, you push a fix, users are mildly annoyed. Healthcare is not that. The first time a client asks you to pull an audit log of every field that was touched on a patient record — and you … Read more