Author: Joshua

The past two years have been a blast. Six days a week, 1,000 words per day. This was the minimal guidance that Stephen King suggested in On Writing, and I took it to heart. On the majority of days I add to the books I’m writing, and push them forward a half chapter, or a…

Every now and then I need to duplicate a WordPress post or page. It’s not a built-in feature, and requires adding a custom plugin to my site. For those who aren’t familiar with WordPress, the plugin ecosystem is a strength and weakness. Thousands of amazing plugins, built by caring and hardworking developers, focused on solving…

I’m very excited about the announced upcoming event next week with Apple. The rumor is that we’re getting updated MacBook Pros. Earlier this year I sold my 2019, top of the line, 15″ MacBook Pro. I then bought an M1 MacBook Air with upgraded ram. As a designer I often push the limits of my…

I’m currently at a challenging points with basic sketching and drawing apps for the iPad. I use these apps almost daily for the initial ideation stage of my design work. Recently I had to purge all of the artwork from Linea Sketch, numbering in the hundreds, and disconnect the the app from iCloud. These were…

Books are amazing. There’s a feeling that I wish I could describe to folks who don’t enjoy reading. The indescribable joy of picking up a great story and diving headlong into the characters and narrative. The joy of disappearing, of being drawn in, and falling in love with a good tale. Those are priceless.I’ve had…

Growing up I had big dreams about where the world would take me. In some ways I’ve gone further than I ever expected, and in some ways I can’t possibly do all the things I want in a single lifetime. That’s okay. As a father, husband, and primary bread winner for the family, it’s my…

At the moment I’m sort of between writing projects. I had a goal of finishing a novel by June 30th. That’s complete, and while there’s some additional work to do, such as the blurb and physical book cover, I accomplished my goal. It feels good to hit that, and to have the book ready to…

I write most days. Since September 2019 I’ve sat down to put words on the page, and bring ideas to reality. The idea came from On Writing, by Stephen King. He suggested, that if you want to be a writer, that, as obvious as it sounds, you must write. And so I’ve taken that to…

I joined Audible in 2011, ten years of listening to hundreds of books. My iPhone app lists 372 titles in my library. I haven’t heard them all, and some are kid’s books, but I have gone through many of them.The key to my reading has been to listen to stories across a variety of genres.…

I’m a fan of writing into the dark, a phrase I picked up from Dean-Wesley Smith. I love to sit down with a blank page and write the first line. It’s taken some practice, but the joy of not knowing brings me back to writing, and pushes me forward. Often I want to start new…

I’m working on connecting to my emotions as an adult; it’s a crutch of mine, and I want to better understanding what I’m feeling day-to-day. Since 2019 I’ve written fiction, and much of my writing has been about how people feel, and what they’re doing. Emotion is a weakness for me. I’ve spent far too…

I’ve had a love hate relationship with watches for my entire life. I remember saving up money to buy a cheap Walmart brand as a nine-year-old. The watch was everything I could want. It told the time and looked cool. The problem, though, came with the destructibility. The connection to my strap broke, and I…

Bluey is the most delightful children’s show I’ve watched, by far. Over the past few months my wife and I caught up on nearly every episode, including Season 2 on Disney+. I must caveat this by adding that I have two small children. I don’t generally sit around and watch kid’s shows on my own. With…

I’ve used video conference calls a lot. In fact, on some days I’ll spend up to six hours on back-to-back calls. In 2015, I joined a remote team that made use of Zoom and Google Hangouts (later Meet) for communication. Since my work has been 100% remote in the last six years, I’ve had a…

We’ve all run across them, and in more recent years a word is used to cover things in our life that just feel – wrong. I’m speaking about dark patterns. Things that force us, as humans interacting with the design, to use it in a way that feels unnatural and goes against the grain. You know…

I’ve written a bit about chairs on this site, their comfort level, ergonomics, positioning, and how I want to use them for work and life arrangements. In the past month I changed things up again, and want to process how that’s affected my time at work. My small home office has three chairs right now.…

My brain shifted over the past year as I’ve taken to daily writing. Before, I’d sit down to put words on the page, and find that my brain shut the process down before it began. We each have two different parts of our brain that fight with each other during the writing process: the creative…

I’ve worked from home for the past six years. In the years prior, my work time was a mixed bag of remote and in-office. Now, living in a small town in Idaho, spending most of my days in a small room, I have a lot of time to figure out what makes sense for an…

I learned to read at a later age than most. For me that came around 8 years old, when I picked up basic books and began to understand the core concepts of reading from my mother. At 9 I was fully in it, so to speak, and reading books on my own. I have vivid…

This has been a long time coming. Years ago someone asked me to compare the Roost versus Nexstand. I ignored the request, and went about my life. Since then I’ve had numerous occasions where the comparison came up. Since I have often worked in coffee shops, co-working spaces, or client onsite, there are opportunities for…