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I imagine most people are familiar with the concept of country of residence, i.e. the country where you are physically living. There are other types of residence as well, like tax residence, which may not always be the same as your physical residence.

CafesThere are so many fantastic, quirky, interesting cafes in Taipei. For a full list of all the spots I’ve visited, check out Cafe and Cowork.

For my recent One Day Build: Expense Tracking project I wanted to enable notifications in a progressive web app. ChatGPT struggled to generate any good code for me, and I also struggled to find any minimal clear explanations online.

For a long time I’ve struggled to find a simple and good expense tracker. I’ve tried several different apps, most recently Wallet and before that, Settle Up. All of the apps I’ve tried worked fine, but usually felt too complicated, lacked some fundamental feature that I wanted, or simply was just too clunky or buggy.

One day while checking our Stripe API usage we discovered that we had some very large traffic spikes, much higher than what we were expecting, peaking at nearly 20k requests per day.

I recently took my first ever cruise (or voyage as Cunard calls it) across the Atlantic onboard the Cunard luxury cruise ship Queen Mary 2 from Southampton, England to New York. However, this wasn’t just a normal holiday cruise, instead I’d be coworking with my co-founder during the transatlantic crossing.

I have a home office!

I’ve been a huge fan of DigitalOcean for many years, and one of my SaaS businesses, AwardFares, has lived there for the past 5 years. We initially ran everything on a couple of Droplets (Ubuntu VPS that we managed ourselves). When DigitalOcean announced their app platform we immediately migrated our app to that, reducing devops to nearly zero. Our database, however, remained as a single mongodb instance running on a self-managed VPS.

Urban subterranean spaces have always fascinated me. While living in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, I learned to appreciate how common and useful they are. These spaces can be quite disorientating at first, and it usually takes a while before you work out where all of the tunnels are, how they connect to each other, and eventually build a mental map.

I recently started using Help Scout for one of my SaaS projects. Help Scout is my go-to solution for customer support once it scales beyond a simple inbox. The UI is simple, clean, easy to use. Their pricing is clear, and the features are solid.

A one week build: InstantRentalAlerts.nl: Instant email alerts for new rentals in the Netherlands. Built with node.js and deployed on DigitalOcean App Platform.

I recently moved my email from Google Workspace to Fastmail. For the most part it’s been going great. However, I have definitely seen an increase in spam hitting my inbox. With Google Workspace I pretty much never received any Spam in my inbox. With Fastmail I receive a couple of messages every week.

Many years ago I switched from Windows to macOS. During this transition I really struggled with the lack of some basic “power user” features in macOS. Here are’s a list of some of my favorite tools and tweaks I use to make my macOS usable.

Most websites end up needing some sort of form submission. It might be a mailing list sign-up, a contact form, or submitting bug reports/feedback. For a static website (or if you just don’t prefer to build any backend), there are quite a few services out there to help “collect” form responses. However, the free services I’ve found tend to be quite limited.

DigitalOcean has long supported monitoring and alerting for Droplet disk usage. Unfortunately there is currently no way to monitor the disk usage of attached volumes. For one of my MongoDB instances I use an attached storage volume in order to easily expand disk usage as needed. However, I needed some way of keeping track of when the volume starts to fill up…

RollerCoaster Tycoon (the original) released in 1999, is easily one of my all-time favorite games. I used to be completely obsessed by it when I was a kid. Every now and then I still get a craving for it.

I’ve been using DigitalOcean’s new App Platform for several months now. As a long time user of DigitalOcean I was eager to try it out when it first launched as I’m always looking for ways to simplify/reduce dev-ops.

I treat my MacBook Pro laptop very well. It barely has a scratch and it’s never had any accidental drops or damage. Even so, my 4 years of owning it has resulted in:

I’ve been adding Umami to most of my websites as an alternative (or potential replacement) to Google Analytics. It’s free, open-source, and has worked great for me during the past couple of months. If you’re comfortable with running your own VPS then you can easily setup a server for $5/mo on DigitalOcean, with minimal maintenance.

We’ve been self-hosting Grafana and an InfluxDB database for a long time, using it for monitoring our custom application metrics. However, we started to push our patience with maintenance and the limits of performance on a $5/mo DigitalOcean droplet.

Since macOS Catalina notarization is required to avoid installed apps from being blocked because “Apple cannot check it for malicious software”. For anyone who already has an Apple developer account (or is willing to create one) you can easily notarize any macOS application using the Xcode command line tools.

Today BrowserFrame.com gets a small update — It is now possible to add a shadow around the browser frame. Simply use the new Shadown Amount and Shadow Color options to adjust the shadow. To remove the shadow, simply clear the shadow options.

Recently STATION WORK “share office” pods have started to appear at several stations in Tokyo, including Shinjuku, Tokyo, and Ikebukuro. After hearing about this I of course had to give it a try!

About 3 years ago I built and launched BrowserFrame.com — a free tool that wraps screenshots in different browser frames (great for mockups and landing pages). It was time to give it a much needed update.

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Tokyo is one of my favorite cities for remote work. It’s easy to get around, there’s good food everywhere, and there are lots of options ranging from cafes and coffee shops to coworking spaces and outdoor locations. Best of all, some of the best places are completely free! Here is a list of the best cafes, coffee shops, coworking spaces, and other spaces for remote work in Tokyo that I have collected over the past 2 years.

Tokyo is by far my favorite food city. Not only can you find all types of amazing Japanese food, but you can also find world class international food. In general food is very affordable unless you go to very upscale places. Here is a list of my favorite places that I have collected over the past 2 years. I would go out of my way to eat at any of the starred places. Other places are definitely worth visiting as well.

There are lots of areas and places to explore in Tokyo. Whether you’re looking for shopping, good views, or retro arcade games you can find whatever you’re interested in. Here is a collection of some of my favorite spots to visit when I’m in Tokyo. Most of these places are actually free so there is plenty to do even if you have a tight budget.

Public transportation in Tokyo is amazing. You can pretty much get from anywhere to anywhere within 30 minutes. However, it is still important to choose where to stay depending on where you plan to spend most of your time. In general, staying anywhere along the JR Yamanote train line that circles Tokyo will enable cheap and convinient access to all of the main areas of Tokyo (especially if you have Japan Rail Pass).

A simple, straight-forward, step-by-step guide to implementing iOS 12 Siri Shortcuts using Objective-C. I noticed that the documentation for integrating the new iOS Shortcuts API is very sparse. After a lot of trial and error, combined with reading the official docs and various tutorials and forum threads, I managed to get everything to work.

This was easily one of the weirdest (but most fun) trips I’ve ever taken, featuring a concert at 38.000 ft, a crown prince, and a punkrock band…

A one week build. Supercharge your Airbnb searches. More listings, more filters, and advanced sorting to help you find your perfect spot. Built with node.js and vue.js, deployed on zeit now.

A one week build. A free tool that helps you wrap screenshots in different browser frames. Supports Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and more. Built with node.js and vue.js, deployed on zeit now.

1 week build + 20 minutes prep = #1 on Product Hunt

A one week build. Built with node.js, deployed on now.

From 100 downloads per day, to 24,000 downloads per day.

Programming is useful for many things – including helping you make reservations at difficult places like David Chang’s Momofuku Ko. Here is what I did…