The Blog

Exploring Some Big Design Changes for Sofa

After two months of grinding on a ton of infrastructure work to enable Smart Lists, this was the first week I was able to dive back into the fun stuff.

Goodbye Board Games

2022 was Sofa's best year by every metric and the product has reached an important milestone in terms of usefulness.

I Quit My Job

July was a busy and stressful month for me. I was working a lot behind-the-scenes to prep for quitting my day job to focus on Sofa full-time.

WWDC, Vision Pro, and a Preview of New Sofa Features

I’ve started working on a few new Sofa features that I've been prepping for a while and I'm happy to share some progress.

Sofa Updates - May 2023

Packing Comparison for the Evergoods CPL24 and CTB26

I just got my CTB26 last week, and since I recently took a weekend trip to Chicago I thought it might be helpful for people to see how I packed things out in my CPL24.

Calculating the Total Number of Week Days Between Two Dates in Notion

Launched Podcast Interview

I just got my CTB26 last week, and since I recently took a weekend trip to Chicago I thought it might be helpful for people to see how I packed things out in my CPL24.

Consistency and Cohesion

The best things I read, watched, played, and listened to in 2020

The SwiftUI Detour

Since SwiftUI is the future of Apple development, I wanted to experiment by rebuilding some of my UIKit views with it.

Why Your Design System Isn’t Working

Creators Campfire Podcast Interview

I was interviewed for the Creators Campfire podcast the other day and had a great time. We chatted about Sofa, app development, and more.

Understanding Design Systems

Thinking Through Custom Items in Sofa

I recently added the ability for people to save custom items to Sofa. This post outlines the thinking behind the feature and how it works.

Moving from Gatsby to WordPress

Implementing iOS 13 Dark Mode Settings in Sofa

In iOS 13, people will be able to choose a light or dark “theme” that will apply system wide. Regardless of what you think about dark mode, apps that don’t adopt this will stick out like a sore thumb.

How to Make Expandable Elements Less Confusing

Things to Keep in Mind When Designing Native Mobile Apps

Design System Resources

Tom Bihn Synik 22 Research

Fixing Sofa’s Tight-Coupling Problem with Coordinators

Sofa was suffering from a tight-coupling problem between view controllers. I discovered this while trying to refactor my massive controllers. I stumbled upon the coordinator pattern, which ended up being a great solution.

Why I Made Sofa FREE

I go over the reasons for making Sofa a free app.

The Story of a PITA Button

I try to get a button working. Yes. A button.

Researching the Sofa App Store Page

I conducted research on the Sofa App Store page. I also discuss the process & tools used to conduct the research.

Let's Design Quick Add

A video showing you the process I went through to design Quick Add in Sofa.

How a Designer Built and Shipped an iOS App in 6 Months

There’s a constant debate about whether or not designers should learn to code. While I’m happy to talk about that at length, I think it’s helpful to look at it from a different perspective.

The Road to Sofa 1.0

When we started working on Sofa, it was very different from what you see today. In fact, it wasn’t even called Sofa. It was called many things: Movie Night, Movie List, and Movie Pal just to name a few. I wanted to share a little bit of the story about how we got to Sofa 1.0.

Some Thoughts on Facebook Paper

iOS Notifications