On this International Women’s Day, I’m taking the time to reflect on the women in my life who have shaped and empowered me — I say without a doubt I am the product of incredibly strong women.

My mom, started her dream business when most wish to retire. She has never conformed to traditional gender roles and she’s damn proud of that.

This year, my partner, pushed her body through so many limits just to bring new life into this world — and she makes it feel like it’s no big deal. …

When I’m old and I look back on my life, I believe it’s safe to say 2017 will be a year that will stick out in my mind.

A year of self-discovery

The year started out with change as I left Buffer, a company I poured my heart and soul into building and growing and loving every minute of working there.

I knew it would be incredibly hard to say goodbye to a team and mission I loved and move on to something else quickly, so I decided to take it slow and spend a few months toying around with product ideas with Leo…

When I started to learn to code in the first year of undergrad, I never truly understood what life opportunities those skills would provide me. After graduating, I had built router software, I had worked with incredibly talented engineers on every layer of the computing stack building a “Kindle for textbooks,” and I had failed to obtain traction founding my first startup with Fancite — a visual Reddit for sports and celebrity fans. Those experiences and string of learning through failures paved a pathway for me to find Buffer.

Shortly after saying goodbye to Fancite, I emailed Joel in 2012…

When I despair, I remember that all through history the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Think of it — always.
Gandhi

I sit here, alone in the comfort and quiet of my living room on a Sunday night. The silence is deafening as my thoughts are with the demonstrators marching on into the night across the nation — preserving liberty and freedom against despotism.

As it’s been an incredibly painful experience to see what’s happening in…

I find myself coming back to watch this talk by Richard Cook nearly every 3 months.

I highly recommend watching this video when you have the chance. It’s an entertaining talk and it’s shaped so much of how I think and operate complex systems.

In the video, Cook describes the properties of complex systems and talks about how all organizations and people typically act and react to system failures. He uses Rasmussen’s Risk Management in a Dynamic Society: A Modelling Problem.

This seems complex, but it’s actually quite simple and I believe the key to being a successful strategic…

A short post on ‘awareness’ and trying to improve how I communicate to be more inclusive.

A lesson I’ve learned over the past three years building and growing the team at Buffer is how important awareness is to self-improvement. I’m starting to think awareness is the tough part and that most of the battle for learning, growing and improving is being aware of what to improve.

When I joined Buffer, I was surrounded by a team that values self-improvement and communicating with clarity. Since we’re a remote team of over 80 people across the world, how we come across in…

This time last year there were 29 people on the Buffer team. Today there are currently 83. It’s been an insane and incredible journey of growth packed into one short year. In this time, we’ve experimented with several organizational changes to keep up. This is now the largest team I’ve ever worked with. It’s so exciting, though one thing that’s on my mind is how can we keep the startup energy and mindset as we keep growing.

Last fall when I sensed we were going to soon enter hyper-growth mode, I was both excited and scared because it meant a…

I started programming 10 years ago this fall. I can’t quite believe how much of my life has been impacted by it and in many ways it’s shaped who I am today. Though it’s a big part of my life, I’ll always remember how tough those early years were for me to learn how to code.

In 2005, I entered college without all that much of a clue of what I wanted to pursue. I think I was drawn to trying out computer science since I enjoyed playing with computers and helping others troubleshoot issues, but there was not much…