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If it ain't broke, don't fix it. While I don't fully subscribe to the above quote, since I think it's important to continually improve things that aren't explicitly broken, every now and then something I use works so well that I consider it a solved problem . In this post I'll be listing items and tools I use that work so well that I'm likely to be a customer for life, or will never have to purchase another. I've split the list into physical and digital tools and will try to keep this list as up...

I browse the discovery feed on Bear daily, both as part of my role as a moderator, and because it's a space I love, populated by a diverse group of interesting people. I've read the posts regarding AI-related content on the discovery feed, and I get it. It's such a prevalent topic right now that it feels inescapable, available everywhere from Christmas dinner to overheard conversation on the subway. It's also becoming quite a polarising one, since it has broad impacts on society and the natural ...

Quick announcement: I'll be visiting Japan in April, 2026 for about a month and will be on Honshu for most of the trip. Please email me recommendations. If you live nearby, let's have coffee? I've always been fascinated by old, multi-generational Japanese businesses. My leisure-watching on YouTube is usually a long video of a Japanese craftsman—sometimes a 10th or 11th generation—making iron tea kettles, or soy sauce, or pottery, or furniture. Their dedication to craft—and acknowledgment that pe...

As outlined in my previous two posts : scrapers are, inadvertently, DDoSing public websites. I've received a number of emails from people running small web services and blogs seeking advice on how to protect themselves. This post isn't about that. This post is about fighting back. When I published my last post, there was an interesting write-up doing the rounds about a guy who set up a Markov chain babbler to feed the scrapers endless streams of generated data. The idea here is that these crawle...

On the 25th of October Bear had its first major outage. Specifically, the reverse proxy which handles custom domains went down, causing custom domains to time out. Unfortunately my monitoring tool failed to notify me, and it being a Saturday, I didn't notice the outage for longer than is reasonable. I apologise to everyone who was affected by it. First, I want to dissect the root cause, exactly what went wrong, and then provide the steps I've taken to mitigate this in the future. I wrote about T...

Now that I've been home for about a month and have all my ducks back in a row, it's time I wrote about my trip to Istanbul for MicroConf Europe . MicroConf is a conference for bootstrapped (non-VC-tracked) founders. And while I don't necessarily view Bear as a business, MicroConf is the closest there is to an Industry Event for someone like me. First a note on Istanbul: I arrived a week early to explore the city and see the sights. I'm a bit of a history nerd, so being at the crossroads of where...

I read an article yesterday, stating that on average, people spend 4 hours and 37 minutes on their phones per day 1 , with South Africans coming in fourth highest in the world at a whopping 5 hours and 11 minutes 2 . This figure seems really high to me. If we assume people sleep roughly 8 hours per day, that means that one third of their day is spent on their phones. If we also assume people work 8 hours per day (ignoring the fact that they may be using their phones during work hours), that sugg...

Most people who read my blog and know me for the development of Bear Blog are surprised to learn that I have another software project in the art and design space. It's called JustSketchMe and is a 3D modelling tool for artists to conceptualise their artwork before putting pencil to paper. It's a very niche tool (and requires some serious explanation to some non-illustrators involving a wooden mannequin and me doing some dramatic poses), however when provided as a freemium tool to the global popu...

Hi everyone, Just some updates about upcoming travel and events; responses to the recent post about social media platforms; and some thoughts about the Bear license update. Travel I'll be heading to Istanbul next week for Microconf , which is a yearly conference where non-venture track founders get together, explore a new city, and learn from one another. I had meant to go to the one last year in Croatia, but had just gotten back from two months in Vietnam, and the thought of travelling again so...

People often assume that I hate social media. And they'd be forgiven for believing that, since I am overtly critical of current social media platforms and the effects they have on individuals and society; and deleted all of my social media accounts back in 2019 . However, the underlying concept of social media is something I resonate with: Stay connected with the people you care about. It's just that the current form of social media is bastardised, and not social at all. Instead of improving rel...