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What's your Google Residence?

Wed, 20 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Taipei Tips (Cafes, Food, Places)

Wed, 29 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Cafes

There 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.

Demystifying Web Push Notifications

Tue, 21 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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.

One Day Build: Expense Tracking

Mon, 23 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Troubleshooting Express.js WebSockets

Mon, 25 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Transatlantic Coworking-Cruise on the Queen Mary 2

Thu, 24 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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.

State of my Hardware (2023)

Wed, 26 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I have a home office!

Going Multi-Region with Zero Devops

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Exploring Taipei Underground

Sun, 28 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Help Scout + Stripe Integration using Custom Dynamic App

Thu, 27 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Building a SaaS product in 1 week

Thu, 14 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

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

Fastmail Spam Learning is Weird

Sat, 04 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

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.

How I use (and abuse) macOS

Tue, 15 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Custom Google Forms for your static website

Tue, 28 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Monitoring DigitalOcean volume disk usage using Awk and Grafana

Mon, 29 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

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…