Philosophy

Just like optimism vs. pessimism, there's another spectrum that every builder, founder, or product person lives on: Maximizing vs. Satisficing. In behavioral economics, a maximizer tries to achieve the best possible outcome. For example: spending hours to find the absolute best hotel for your vacation. A satisficer, on the other hand, picks the first option that meets their basic requirements—and moves on with their day. When developing products, it's incredibly useful to know where you fall on that scale because: There’s not simple answer when to apply which strategy. ...

I just finished The Bright Side by Sumit Paul-Choudhury—a solid deep-dive into the history, psychology, and applicability of optimism. The social science is clear: overall, optimists tend to achieve better outcomes. Why? Because they act. Optimists move toward a positive vision of the future, and in doing so, often stumble upon unexpected opportunities. Pessimists, by contrast, lean toward fatalism and inaction — and the world rarely arranges itself in exactly the way they’d like, anyway. ...

One of the perks of working independently on an early-stage product is flexibility — but that comes with a risk: running out of steam. Like I said in my post about #pacing, it’s key not to overextend on the good days and not to check out completely when the work feels like a slog. One trick I’ve found increasingly helpful as the codebase grows? Keep a backlog of quick wins: ...

The bigger your codebase grows, the more important it becomes to stay consistent — in naming things and in how you use features of your programming language. Take input parameters and variables, for example. Is the ID of a Save object sometimes named save_id, other times saveId, and occasionally just id? Is the function to load it called load_save(...), get_save(...), or fetch_save(...)? Or maybe it’s load_save(...) for saves, but get_settings(...) and fetch_tag(...) elsewhere? If so, confusion is only a matter of time. ...

As I add more UI-heavy functionality to poketto.me (not all of it public yet), I keep running into the same issue: it’s tempting — but risky — to constantly invent new UI patterns and elements. Case in point: On the Saves page, each saved item has a “more” menu with actions like Archive, Delete, or Edit Tags. But when I worked on the News Feed, I completely overlooked this. Instead, I gave each news item its own action bar — dedicated buttons to save the item or, once saved, edit its tags. (See Exhibit A.) ...

As I dive deeper into poketto.me, I keep running into an increasingly tricky question: How much time should I spend exploring new features — and how much actually building them? Having worked as a Product Owner, Manager, and Director, envisioning exciting new features comes naturally. And with poketto.me, the possibilities seem endless: 🎧 Personalized podcasts 🗞️ AI-curated newsfeeds 📝 Automatic summaries 📬 Individualized daily digests 🖊️ Highlights, annotations, organization tools 🔍 Full-text search and even personal knowledge management (PKM) ...

Working on a substantial project without real external pressure — deadlines, financial run rates, etc. — comes with a huge risk: you can easily run out of steam. When your only driver is your own motivation, you have to manage that resource wisely. Case in point: when I started tinkering with poketto.me, I thought I’d just replicate Pocket’s feature set and be done within four weeks. Initial success came quickly — things worked the way I’d hoped, the UI kept getting better, AI coding tools helped kick-start the boilerplate work on infrastructure… But then I started slacking off. I kept postponing work on the Chrome extension, the website, or the GTM strategy, and turned my attention to other side hustles instead. The initial drive I’d had simply faded. ...

It’s surprisingly hard to settle on a “fit-for-purpose” technology and tool stack for a modern SaaS / Cloud app. First of all, there are the technical decisions: 🔀 Which frontend, backend, and persistence stack do you use? Angular vs. React, Java vs. Python, Spring Boot vs. Rails vs. Django vs. Flask, MongoDB vs. Firebase vs. MySQL vs. Postgres… 🔀 Do you run it on AWS (Amazon), GCP (Google Cloud), or Azure (Microsoft)? ...

This one’s a bit more philosophical—but stay with me: There are things in life we can control, and things we can’t. That distinction lies at the heart of Stoic philosophy, most famously articulated by Epictetus in the first century BC. What does that have to do with product development? A lot, actually. When you’re working on a small, independent project like poketto.me, it’s easy to grow frustrated with a lack of resonance. LinkedIn posts don’t get the traction you hoped for. Journalists don’t reply. Mozilla doesn’t respond, even after you’ve tried to nudge them on all imaginable platforms,. It can feel like you’re putting something good into the world—and the world is simply ignoring it. ...