How to hire a personal doctor Imagine you're about to make a decision that could profoundly impact your health, potentially for years to come. You're not choosing a new diet or exercise routine - you're selecting a personal doctor.
It sounds simple, right? After all, they're all qualified professionals. But here's the catch: this choice might be one of the riskiest decisions you'll ever make....
health Publish Originally, Syndicate Elsewhere Writing for yourself on your personal website is the purest form of self-expression on the internet. It avoids any trappings from the algorithmic maze. And there are no digital echo chambers. It's just you and your ideas in your own cozy little garden.
We're witnessing the renaissance of personal websites. As social platforms become increasingly unstable, more creators are rediscovering the power of digital sovereignty....
blogging Public gardens, secret routes When you land on a site, you are treated with various hyperlinks. Based on the UX choices you make, you might end up preferring one over the other. You might get the job done, and head back to your earlier Chrome tab. Nothing out of the ordinary. It's an internet search as usual.
But what about those pages which have no visible links on the site you just searched. It’s hidden in plain sight, but still useful in certain contexts. ...
digital-garden Repetitive Copyprompting While designing health campaigns for [Noora Health](app://obsidian.md/Noora%20Health)'s work in Indonesia and Bangladesh, I was overseeing the health communications strategy for pregnant and newly-delivered mothers. There were messages in a specific format that needed to be rewritten in a more easy to digest Whatsapp format appealing to the people of Bangladesh. My usual default response to such tasks would be to open a tab on ChatGPT and get to promptcrafting until I was able to achieve the best output.
This was the prompt I'd used to do the same:...
writing Digital Products built like physical artisanal tools Tobias Van Schneider in his blog talks about a new way to think about building modern software—
The advancements of our modern world mean there’s generally more of everything. The streaming age has led to a proliferation of low-quality content, churned out to satisfy the binge-watching masses. The ever-scrolling audiences and their short attention spans require news sources to up the ante, publishing throwaway articles (increasingly written by robots) like hotcakes. Industrialization and the off-loading of production to developing countries means clothes are mass-produced, designed to be thrown away and replaced one season to the next. ...
design Weekly TODO List on CLI I built a command line tool as a simple TODO list. I've always enjoyed the elegance of the CLI for various purposes, and have sometimes preferred doing tasks directly on CLI instead of resorting to any GUI for these needs.
In my recent hobbyist avatar transitioning to become more of a "vibe-coder" from my earlier designer adventures, I've quite enjoyed using code, as well as interfaces that are more appealing to use code....
prototypes Meta-analysis for contradictory research findings In the world of nutrition research, contradictory findings are as common as fad diets.
One day, a study proclaims the benefits of a low-carb diet for weight loss. The next, another study champions a plant-based diet for overall health. This constant flip-flopping of dietary advice leaves most of us feeling like we're stuck in a nutritional ping-pong match....
health Design is a confusing word As designers, we’re always asked to vouch for the user’s needs above anything else. But if the company takes a hit, all of our efforts might end in vain.
To solve this dilemma, this note from Dan Winer comes in handy—...
design Directory Structure Visualizer I wanted an easy way in which I could visualise any directory that i'm navigating on the CLI. Yes, you did have standard npm packages such as "tree" for example, but those were not very helpful for me to understand the overall size of the files. I wanted a more "detailed" tree that could help me gauge how the codebase looks like.
For this reason, I created this package — dftree. This generates more visual UX-friendly representations of directory structures using Unicode box-drawing characters....
prototypes Do's and Don'ts of User Research Some principles which I follow while doing user-centered design:
1. Involving users early in the product development process makes products intuitive and fosters loyalty. It is essential to zoom out and follow a constant process of hypothesis testing, MVP development, review, and refinement. Preparation of research requires a clear goal and involvement of the research team....
design It's computational everything I was listening to a talk by [Debbie Mcmahon from Financial Times recently at Productcon](Notes%20from%20ProductCon%202025.md) recently and I was surprised by the fact that even in journalism we're seeing tailwind trends more and more computational skills required — genAI is now used to spot stories, and to spin up newsworthy headlines and narratives around these stories.
They are now, '**computational journalists**'...who are equipped with AI, data and trendspotting skills. ...
rough-notes Understanding codebases without using code Analysing codebase and understanding the patterns followed at a top level has become surprisingly easier nowadays with the help of tools such as Gemini (for larger context windows), Gitingest (to convert codebases to simpler markdown), and Mermaid.js (for visualising mermaid diagrams).
This is how I would approach understanding a fresh new codebase in order to take a cursory look:...
rough-notes Questions to ask every decade This is a list inspired by [Kepano in his blog:](https://stephanango.com/40-questions)
1. What would you do if you had [6 months to live?](app://obsidian.md/HARVARD%20mens-health-50-and-forward.pdf#page=3&selection=27,0,30,39)...
rough-notes Methods are lifejackets not straight jackets Design methods are life jackets. Not straight jackets.
Structures, whether they're processes, frameworks, or plans, are excellent tools to navigate complicated problems. They bring efficiency, reduce ambiguity, and offer defaults. ...
methodology Convert v0.dev React to Rails ViewComponents As a Rails developer who builds passion projects solo with this framework, i find myself blessed with an array of well-thought defaults for each specific utility. These vetted defaults make it really convenient to think more of the actual modelling of the business, and the core value proposition instead of having to think about the right package that's well maintained and that which is compatible with what we're doing. From my limited knowledge developing projects in Javascript Land, as well as in the Rails land, I find that most time spent in Javascript Land is in choosing the right library or a package or a dependency. That's not what i imagined software building to be like. It is supposed to be fun and imaginative and creative and so many other things.
A tool which I have been using to quickly prototype front end is this service called v0.dev. It helps in quickly building mockups which have great flair and pizzazz. The designs are atleast 90% in line with what i had in mind, and I just have to modify some of these components generated with surgical precision to get where i want. Now, the unfortunate reality here is that this tool is very handy to generate NextJS/React UI, and it isn't compatible with Ruby on Rails projects....
prototypes Song of Shapes, Words and Paths Three different kinds of humans exist in this planet. Shape rotators, wordcels and journey-shifters. You are usually a mix of one, two or all of these traits.
...
creativity How I build greenfield apps with AI-assisted coding Building apps with AI-assisted coding can be quite tricky if you start with a blank empty space. Previously I used to prompt the LLMs like a rookie by saying "fix this, add this, build this", and so on. And this is usually frowned upon in the developer circles, and it seems to be quite an irresponsible way to do AI-assisted programming. But "vibe coding" has so much more to offer to this world, in terms of speed and velocity, and it's important to not loose sight of the larger goal: to build the right things, and build things right. It's indeed a weird trajectory that programming has taken recently, and if this works out, why not embrace it?
Any app is only as good as our ability to carefully prompt them. This could make or break the vibe-coded app. I first came across [Harper Reed's blog](https://harper.blog/2025/02/16/my-llm-codegen-workflow-atm/) talking about his own LLM-aided coding workflow, I felt like sharing something similar based on what I've learnt. Harper goes through a lot more LLM assistants, but my advice here is specific to Cursor IDE:...
ai-coding Thinking like a ship It took me a long time to realize that arguments we argue about — aren’t always about facts. They are about values.
Reading [Jonathan Haidt's _The Righteous Mind_](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion/dp/0141039167) made this clearer that: **be it liberals or conservatives, or activists or traditionalists — they’re all wired with different moral priorities—care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity**. ...
rough-notes Self Marketing **_I decided to revive a long-lost interest and try my hand at cartooning. But it was an unlikely dream, given my complete lack of artistic talent and the rarity of success stories in that business. So I decided to try something called affirmations, which I will describe in more detail later in the book. I bought some art supplies, practiced drawing every morning before work, and wrote my affirmation fifteen times a day: "I, Scott Adams, will be a famous cartoonist."_**
Marketing in other words is using the technology of 'language' in devious ways. Towards manipulation and subterfuge. At least that's how I understood it....
rough-notes 