Latest articles
Nothing left to take away
Perfection isn't the longest feature list. It's the tool with nothing left to take away. That makes a focused deadline tool a quiet kind of luxury, the way one well-made instrument beats a drawer of gadgets.
Yes, no, and the cost of maybe
Every extra option on a control is a comparison you have to run. The decisions that hold up under load are binary, because a choice is worth the direction it sets, not the precision it pretends to.
Built to keep up
Speed, reliability, and a calm interface aren't three separate goals. They're one blueprint where each side holds the others up. It shaped everything from a tracker-free page to durable reminders to a copy of your data you can always take with you.
The shelf, not the trash
Set-aside work is neither done nor abandoned, so it needs a home that is neither the record nor the trash. Why Deadlinewatch gives every deadline exactly one place to live.
The two hard parts of a repeating deadline
"Repeats monthly" looks like an afternoon of work and turns into a week. The two edges where recurrence breaks, and how to build it so the promise holds.
How do you test a product nobody uses yet?
You can simulate persona-driven users against your real product before launch. Done honestly, the method finds falsifiable defects, not opinions.
I built a sandcastle, then I designed the wave
Half of making something is building it. The other half is deliberately designing the forces that try to break it, because you can't trust what you haven't tried to break.
The email is a poke
Deadlinewatch's email reminder is a poke, a nudge for when you're away from the app, set per deadline, pointing you back to where the work is.
The floor and the ceiling
A per-deadline reminder and the overview you open answer two different questions, so a tool that does its job needs both, the push that finds you and the pull that shows you everything at once.
The boring bug that would have broken everything
The bug that would have broken everything was boring and nearly invisible, the kind that slips by while you chase shinier features. The only reason it never reached a user is testing that was ruthless from the first day on.
One surface, no hidden settings
Simplicity is not the absence of capability but the refusal to make the user hunt for it, so a control belongs where the user already reaches for it, not scattered behind menus.
It is hard to go back and forth. That is the work.
Usefulness comes from the unglamorous willingness to revisit decisions you thought were settled, and the back-and-forth that feels like backtracking is actually the work.
Fireside with the maker of Deadlinewatch
I spent twenty years carrying other people's deadlines, and I knew there had to be a better way to hold them. So I built one, the way I'd solve any hard problem. This is the personal story of how, and what it cost.
Everything I removed
Adding a feature feels like progress, because you can see the new thing. Removing one feels like loss. The removals were the progress.
The tool I wanted would have made me worse.
I wanted a tool that would tell me what to do. I built one. Then I learned that the telling was the part I had to take back out.
The years before the tool
I didn't set out to build a deadline tool. I set out to stop doing a particular kind of arithmetic in my head, and the tool is what was left when I finished.