For many, design can seem like magic — a dark art that only few can master. It can be intimidating to learn, especially since many people think that design sense is innate: either you’re born with it or you’re out of luck. (Not true.) Disclaimer: I’m not a designer. I’m…

Engineered for fast image loading and smooth scrolling — In 2015, I decided to take a picture of everything I ate. Every sandwich, every chip, and every square of chocolate. For 365 days, if I ate it, I took a picture of it. When December rolled around, I had over 1,800 pictures with nowhere to put them. …

It’s amazing how far the hackathon community has come in just a few years. Back in February 2014, when Hackcon first kicked off in the cramped but homey AlleyNYC, the hackathon world looked very different than now. …

It’s not hard to tell a good website from a great website. You can feel it. While most designers consider proper word choice, typography, and spacing, there are some details that are often forgotten. This is a list of tweaks to consider whenever you build a website. …

Making websites just got a lot easier. — When it comes to web development, there’s a lot to learn. Maybe someone has told you to use vendor prefixes for cross-browser compatibility, to minify your code to decrease load time, or to use a linter so that your CSS and JavaScript follows best practices. Maybe someone has ranted about…

For hackathons, differentiation isn’t the goal — I spent last weekend at Hackcon, the hackathon organizers conference. On Sunday, I was tasked with taking notes for a workshop entitled “Being Different,” which spun out from Jeff Hilnbrand’s talk on the same subject. …

Recently, I wrote a post entitled LinkedIn Dark Patterns, which enumerated all of the ways that LinkedIn uses design to trick users into importing their address book into LinkedIn (allowing them to then get you to accidentally invite those contacts to LinkedIn). …

or: Why Your Friends Keep Spamming You to Sign Up for LinkedIn — In December of 2013, I closed my LinkedIn account. As I retold in an emotional post Facebook post, I had discovered that I had been sending those annoying “Dan Schlosser has invited you to join LinkedIn” emails to my friends. …

A few days ago, I migrated my personal blog to Medium. From now on, I’ll be publishing here instead of on my website. I had some good reasons to stay off it for so long, but I’m glad that I switched. I’m a big believer in personal websites, especially self-hosted…