One of my biggest commercial wins was a seemingly small UI tweak that led to a roughly 2% marketplace revenue bump. Teachers Pay Teachers (TPT, think "Etsy for Teachers" -- educational resources created by and sold to other educators) was a mature marketplace, where revenue wins were typically under 0.5%. How …

A couple of months ago I released Almost Five, a fuzzy-text watchface for the reborn Pebble smartwatch. It's been fun hacking on watch faces, but I realized I had a practical gap: I needed a count-up stopwatch I could wear on my wrist while cooking, without pulling out my phone.

There are lots of timer apps on the …

One of my specialties as a freelance consultant is discovery systems for e-commerce -- web pages and backend systems for helping users search for and find what they want or need. For the last year and a half, I've been working as a consultant for DesignShop, a company that sells materials samples for home renovations. …

You might remember the old Pebble smartwatch -- a minimalist e-ink watch that was popular among a certain set ten or so years ago. Well, it's back -- the original creator is manufacturing new hardware, and the software has been open-sourced. I wasn't on the bandwagon when they were originally popular, but I picked up …

This post is a little different. I have a layperson's/nerd's interest in cosmology and physics, and have tried to read a few books about current research. Recently, I ran across some new work suggesting a pretty radical shift in theory. Not finding a great summary for the non-physicist reader, I had Google Gemini write …

Say you're an Engineering Manager or a Product Manager, responsible for a business-critical search system on a website. Maybe e-commerce, maybe a marketplace, maybe something else. Search is sort of working, it doesn't crash, and it's fast, but there's a feeling that "search isn't great", and you've been …

I grew up playing Scrabble -- my grandma was cuthroat. I've played occasionally through the years, and more recently I've been playing Scrabble Go, the official, licensed Scrabble app, with friends. It's fine, but it's full of ads (unless you pay them), it has annoying side games (gems? why am I earning gems?), and I …

This is the last post in the IZE series. In the previous installment, I looked at two ways to generalize the IZE algorithm itself: preferring consistent facets and searching for trees with better goodness scores. Here I want to ask a different question: what does the AI revolution of the last few years actually change …

In previous posts, I showed off an interactive demo of the IZE algorithm, and discussed how the algorithm worked. Now, it's worth considering some ways we could generalIZE the algorithm. 🤦‍♂️ Perhaps variations on the algorithm might yield hierarchies that are even better at showcasing the contents of the texts?

As …

In the previous installment of this series, I looked at what came after IZE -- faceted search, clustering algorithms, and the various ways web search, personal information management, and e-commerce tried to solve similar problems to what IZE was attacking. None of them ended up doing what IZE did. The question I want …