Why You’d Want GitHub Actions Handling Your Netlify Deploys Netlify’s built-in Git integration is genuinely good — until you need it to do something slightly outside its happy path. The second your build process requires more than “install, build, deploy,” you hit a wall. You can’t inject a secret mid-build without exposing it as an … Read more
The $600/Year Problem Nobody Talks About Check your last Adobe renewal email. Not the one from three years ago — the most recent one. If you’re on the All Apps plan, you’re probably staring at somewhere between $599 and $659/year depending on when you locked in your pricing and whether Adobe decided to bump it … Read more
The Setup: Two Tools Wars at Once Seven people. Two tool wars. Thirty days. That’s the shortest version of how I ended up running parallel evaluations of Asana vs Trello and Figma vs Sketch on the same fintech product team while we were still trying to ship actual features. We were onboarding this team in … Read more
The Real Problem: You’re Making Product Decisions on Vibes The loudest customer in your Slack channel is not your average user. I’ve watched PMs — myself included, early on — spend an entire sprint building a feature because one enterprise account complained twice in the same week. That feature then sits at 2% adoption three … Read more
The Problem: Your Tests Pass Locally and Explode in CI The classic failure: green locally, red in CI, nobody knows why You run your Selenium suite locally — 47 tests, all green, ship it. The PR hits GitHub Actions and 23 tests fail. Half of them are TimeoutException, a few are NoSuchElementException, and one is … Read more
The HubSpot Free Trap (And Why I Walked Away) The 1,000 contact wall hit me on a Tuesday afternoon, three days into a drip campaign I’d been building for two weeks. HubSpot’s free tier didn’t warn me with a grace period or a soft degradation — it just stopped enrolling new contacts into the sequence. … Read more
The Setup: Why I Even Bothered Testing Sketch Again Our designer Maya had been on Sketch since version 3. She had a symbol library that was genuinely impressive — years of accumulated components, carefully named, properly nested. Then we hired two frontend engineers who’d never opened a Mac app that cost $99/year, and our PM … Read more
The Real Problem: You’re a Financial Analyst, Not a Dev, But You’re Expected to Build Internal Tools Your eng team has a 6-week backlog. Your investor update is Friday. Welcome to fintech startup life. Here’s the situation I see constantly: you’re a financial analyst at a Series A or B fintech startup, you’re good at … Read more
The Problem: Your Lighthouse Score is 94 and Your Users Still Hate the Site The Gap Between Your Lighthouse Score and Your Users’ Reality A client came to me frustrated. Their site scored 91 on Lighthouse. Conversions were tanking. Users were bouncing. I pulled their Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) data and found a 4.2-second … Read more
The Problem: AutoCAD’s Student License Expires and Nobody Warns You The thing that caught me off guard was the expiration email. Autodesk sends it, but it lands at a point in your third year when you’re drowning in studio deadlines, and you don’t really process what it means. Then you graduate, land an internship, show … Read more