The hundreds of choices we face every day are our gym. — I’ve been deliberating about what to write this week, and the internal debate has gone longer than I like–which seems like the perfect topic. Let’s do this. Lately I’ve been working on something very specific in life and work: Shortening the length of the debate-decide-act cycle. Whether I’m deciding what…

A case for being action-oriented in the face of doubting onlookers. — My grandmother was an extraordinary cook who expressed her love for her family by preparing delicious Italian meals. My grandfather was a dressmaker who worked six days a week. …

In matters of representation, representation matters. — When Anne Lister wrote in her journal about what she did, who she saw, and the news of the day, she wrote in “plain hand,” her normal handwriting. But when she wrote about her relationships with her lovers–always women, sometimes married to men–she switched to “crypt hand,” a code she…

There’s no right answer, but plenty of risks in both directions — When your company needs software to solve a problem — whether it’s a full-featured product, an API, or a low-level library — should you build it in-house or buy it off the shelf? This is one of the first questions Postlight helps our clients answer when we discuss their business…

A few uncomfortable truths, and keys for success, for people who build software. — Estimating how much time and effort it will take to build or fix software isn’t easy, and most people are really bad at it. The more senior you get in your career building software: The more projects you will work on that run over time and budget, and not by…

People who publish on the web love WordPress. Engineers love React. With some research, configuration, and trial and error, you can have both — but we’d like to save you the work. Meet Postlight’s WordPress + React Starter Kit, a free, zero-to-hero toolkit for engineers and product tinkerers who want…

On writing software for future engineers Part of my job here at Postlight is speaking to people who are considering hiring us to help their company build a product. These talks are pretty fascinating. I don’t think of them as “sales” as much as I think of them as counseling…

Hello, world. We have new client work to show you. Postlight partnered with the legendary Village Voice to reimagine, redesign, and rebuild their website. The fruit of that collaboration just went live. Check it out right now at villagevoice.com! When we got started, we saw the Voice’s existing site was…

There’s a certain kind of old-school, backend web developer who, a long time ago, mastered things like Perl or Python or PHP or Java Server Pages, maybe even Rails or Django. This person worked with giant relational databases and built APIs that serve up JSON and even (gasp!) XML. This…